


The Precocity Virus

by Golden Pristine (Golden_Pristine)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Accidental Relationship, Accidental Stimulation, Activism, Adoption, Adoption of Grandchild, Afterglow, Age of Consent, Alabama, American Politics, Artificial Insemination, Assassination, Assassination Attempt(s), Awkward Crush, Awkward Flirting, Bad Decisions, Bad Parenting, Bath Sex, Bathing/Washing, Bathroom Sex, Bathrooms, Bedroom Sex, Bedrooms, Bedtime Stories, Being Walked In On, Best Friends, Birth, Birth Control, Birthday, Birthday Cake, Blackmail, Blankets, Blood, Board Games, Breeding, Bureaucracy, Carrying, Caught, Cesarean Section, Character Death, Child On Child Sex, Childbirth, Childhood Friends, Children Having Children, Comfort, Coming of Age, Computer Programming, Consensual Underage Sex, Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories, Cousins, Cowgirl Position, Crushes, Cuddling & Snuggling, Curiosity, Cute, Cute Kids, Dare, Discovery, Discussion of Abortion, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Don't Stand So Close To Me, Double Life, Dreams and Nightmares, Earrings, Elementary School, Embarrassment, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enthusiastic Consent, Environmentalism, Erections, Euphemisms, Exoneration, Explanations, Explicit Consent, Extremely Underage, F/M, Family Dinners, Fertility Issues, First Crush, First Kiss, First Time, Flirting, Forehead Kisses, Foreplay, Foreshadowing, Forgiveness, Friendship, From Sex to Love, Gaming, Genetic Engineering, Gentle Kissing, Gentle Sex, Gentleness, Getting Together, Getting to Know Each Other, Gift of Life, Gossip, Government Conspiracy, Grinding, Groping, Guilt, Guilty Pleasures, Heavy Petting, Heteronormativity, Horror, Horseback Riding, Horses, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Hymen, I'm Gonna Keep My Baby, Illegal Activities, Imagination, Impregnation, In Character, Inappropriate Erections, Infection, Internet, Intimacy, Investigations, Irony, Jealousy, Judgment, Just A Dream, Kissing, Know Too Much, Labor Unions, Laboratories, Lap Sex, Lap Sitting, Law Enforcement, Literal Sleeping Together, Little Mermaid Elements, Little Sisters, Loli, Loli X Shota, Loss of Innocence, Loss of Virginity, Love, Making Love, Making Out, Making Up, Married Cousins, Masturbation, Masturbation Interruptus, Masturbation in Bathroom, Masturbation in Shower, Menarche, Menopause, Menstrual Euphemisms, Menstruation, Messy, Minnesota, Monopoly (Board Game), Monsters, Morning After, Morning Sickness, Multiple Orgasms, My Little Pony References, Naked Cuddling, Narrated Profanity, Neck Kissing, Negotiations, Nightmare Sequence, Nightmares, Nipples, No Abortion, No Incest, No One Should Have This Power, No deal, Nudity, Oblivious, Orgasm, Orgasm Delay, Out of Character, Pain, Painful Sex, Pajamas & Sleepwear, Parenthood, Pedophilia, Penis In Vagina Sex, Playing Marriage, Plot Twists, Points of View, Politics, Porn Watching, Pregnancy, Pregnancy Test, Pregnant Sex, Pretend marriage, Professors, Promiscuity, Promises, Protection, Punishment, Racism, Reconciliation, Reconciliation Sex, Religion, Reveal, Safer Sex, Scents & Smells, School, School Clubs, Science Fiction, Seattle, Second Time, Secrets, Self-Denial, Self-Destruction, Self-Indulgent, Self-Lubrication, Separations, Sex Education, Sex Is Fun, Sex Positions, Sharing, Shota, Shut Up Kiss, Silence, Single Parents, Size Difference, Sleeping Together, Sleepovers, Slow Burn, Slurs, Snogging, Staring, State Politics, Statutory Rape, Straight Shota, Students, Sulking, Surrogacy, Surveillance, Sweet Home Alabama, Symbolic Marriage, Talking, Talking to Unborn Baby, Teacher-Student Relationship, Tears, Teasing, Teen Pregnancy, Temptation, Tender Sex, Tenderness, The Talk, Third Wheels, Touching, Two Girls/One Boy - Freeform, Underage Kissing, Underage Masturbation, Underage Pregnancy, Underage Sex, Understanding, Uninformed Consent, Unplanned Pregnancy, Unsafe Sex, Vaginal, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Vanilla Kink, Video & Computer Games, Vigilantism, Virginity, Virus, Walking In On Someone, Watching, Wet & Messy, Wet Dream, With A Twist, club, clubs, extremely underage pregnancy, feminine hygiene, girl on top, grounded, hairless, ironic ending, maidenhead, monsters under the bed, necking, no adoption, no happy ending, population control, straight loli, twist ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:00:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 103,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27608659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Golden_Pristine/pseuds/Golden%20Pristine
Summary: In a secret military lab, a pedophile with a fetish for children having children creates a virus to accelerate female reproductive systems’ maturation rates worldwide. This touches off a worldwide crisis of declining fertility and plummeting birth rates as young girls in their tweens and single digits begin ovulating and menstruating earlier and earlier while women and older girls cease doing so at younger and younger ages. This leaves all the world—and specifically two families somewhere in rural Alabama—with a moral and social dilemma: people can still have offspring if they let little girls young enough to be in elementary school be impregnated on their families’ behalf; but will they dare to do so with so many personal and social taboos and legal prohibitions standing in their way?This is the story of two families that dare to do so by persuading two pubescent tween boys who are best friends to impregnate each other's little sisters, and thereby ensure the continuation of their family lines; but at what cost to themselves, and how will their society react? Will people accept that they did what they had to do? What price will humanity ultimately pay to keep from going extinct?
Relationships: Original Character & Original Character, Original Character(s)/Original Character(s), Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s), Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 58
Kudos: 48





	1. Prologue: Engineering

On the outskirts of Seattle was a top secret military laboratory deep beneath the ground. Its existence was known to few, and its location to fewer; in more recent years, the research there had not yielded anything of value to the military brass who were supposed to be administrating it, and the funding politicians had appropriated for this research in a spending bill decades ago continued to be appropriated through bureaucratic inertia more than anything else. Nonetheless, the privileged few who knew of both its existence and location fully appreciated the necessity of keeping these secrets from everyone else, since they knew very few of the local citizens and their elected officials would be at all pleased to discover they were living near a lab that (in theory, at least) researched and developed bio-weapons.

One of these privileged few was Doctor Geoffrey Klahn, a former biology professor now turned genetic engineer who was officially heading up the research team and all of its projects since the previous leader’s sudden and mysterious death from accidentally infecting himself with one of the experimental viruses he’d engineered. What was so mysterious about this death was that such carelessness was rather out of character for the late Doctor Phillip O’Donnell, known to be meticulous about enforcing the lab’s safety protocols to what everyone else considered almost a paranoid extent; nevertheless, all evidence pointed to his accident having come from recklessly disregarding these protocols. In fact, he’d been so reckless that the officer conducting the internal investigation briefly considered ruling the death a suicide, thinking that perhaps the doctor’s self-infection had been quite deliberate; but Klahn had—with some difficulty—dissuaded him of this, insisting that in his final days working in the lab, O’Donnell had actually been in a very upbeat and visionary state of mind about a breakthrough he’d just made while doing an experiment.

The investigator’s security clearance level was insufficient to investigate the exact nature of this experiment and its associated breakthrough. Nevertheless, with his superiors pressuring him to make a ruling and his investigation lacking the authority to gather any further evidence, he felt he had little recourse but to yield to the pressure and rule O’Donnell’s death an improbable accident. For the rest of his life, he would always retain a lingering doubt whether this decision had been the right one, though this uncertainty only bothered him on exceedingly rare occasions when something reminded him of it.

Had that investigator been granted a higher-level security clearance, he would have had even more reason to doubt the wisdom of closing the investigation, for Klahn and O’Donnell had gotten into a very bitter argument with each other during the latter’s final days; and the nature of their research had been quite instrumental in precipitating this controversy between them. While not responsible for his former superior’s death, neither was he at all stricken with grief over it, especially since it had made him the lab’s new director. With O’Donnell out of the way and all other superiors being distant administrators who would interfere only minimally with the lab’s day-to-day operations, he was now free to direct all research and development according to his own philosophy.

O’Donnell’s last project, as pitched to his superiors, was intended to develop a pathogen that would be both universally contagious and extremely customizable: something which could spread to any and every individual human on the planet, and yet would be programmed to wreak some kind of havoc (lethal or otherwise) only on those hosts who had a specific genetic pattern unique to one certain race, tribe, family, or even individual. While far from the first to pitch such a concept to them, he had the advantage of having already achieved the customization of just such a virus in an experiment on a hundred lab rats which ended with all of them infected, but only two suffering its adverse effects due to having the specifically targeted genetic sequence in their DNA. His superiors were impressed, and immediately approved the allocation of funding to this promising new line of research.

Since the pathogen O’Donnell had customized in his first experiment had been a sexually transmitted disease common to rodents, it was far from being the universal contagion he desired. For this new project, he determined to customize something airborne such as a common cold or an influenza virus, and to find some way of modifying it to keep it from triggering an immune response in its hosts for as long as possible to maximize its potential contagiousness. With his subordinates’ help, and a lot of trial and error, he eventually succeeded at producing just such a “null” airborne virus which avoided provoking an immune response by doing next to nothing to its hosts.

From there, combining this experimental breakthrough with O’Donnell’s previous results to reprogram this “null” virus into doing something after all when it encountered certain specific genetic sequences in its hosts proved remarkably easy. With the biological mechanisms for both spreading the pathogen and targeting specific hosts for victimization, the only question in need of an answer was what form the victimization should take; or to put it in laymen’s terms, what this virus should actually do to its targets. Though O’Donnell had some definite plans concerning this subject, answering this question was more his subordinate colleague Klahn’s specialty.

From thence arose their bitter argument, for though O’Donnell had a rare talent for what computer programmers would call “hacking” pathogens’ genetic codes, Klahn’s talent for genetic engineering involved a much deeper understanding of what those codes actually did, effectively enabling him to “program” those pathogens from scratch. While O’Donnell deserved full credit for engineering a biological mechanism for targeting a payload’s delivery, therefore, Klahn was the one who knew enough to determine exactly what that payload would be. With O’Donnell in command, Klahn officially had to follow his orders; but in unofficial reality, Klahn knew enough to be able to deviate from his orders with O’Donnell being none the wiser, apart from having a sneaking suspicion he couldn’t quite articulate to anyone (including himself) that his subordinate was too dangerously ambitious and clever to be trustworthy.

To be sure, both men knew the primary end product their superiors were hoping to obtain from this project was a pathogen they could employ for assassination—or “targeted killing” as they so euphemistically preferred to refer to it; something that would immediately cut down its intended victim(s) with no one ever finding out what had caused such sudden and unexpected death(s), or—if anyone somehow did—being at all able to trace it back to its source. Disturbing as they found contemplating how someone might use—and abuse—this power to assassinate anyone and never be identified as the assassin, Klahn and O’Donnell found contemplating some of the other products their research might develop even more disturbing. While possessing a bio-weapon with the power to slay anyone opposed to one’s ambitions might make a megalomaniac out of anyone, its potential to be a corrupting influence paled in comparison to that of a pathogen with the power to alter humanity itself; and each of these men secretly had ambitions to make some of these sweeping alterations to humanity.

The rather elitist O’Donnell, who had previously been a nigh-fanatical believer in many of academia’s trendy left-wing cultural and social theories as a college student only to reject them in later years as “the self-loathing sophistry of their internalized racism and sexism,” nevertheless still retained some of their radical environmentalist penchants for eugenics and population control as part of his outlook on humanity. Though he’d also rejected these radicals’ apocalyptic predictions about Earth’s ever-changing climate as a load of politically self-serving pseudoscience, he still believed in the simple cold equations of Malthusianism: too many humans dividing not enough resources among themselves would inevitably lead to tragic crises that could easily have been avoided, had these populations only taken some responsibility for limiting their numbers. To be sure, scientific innovation had allowed humanity to increase the efficiency with which it exploited the planet’s resources at such an impressive rate that it might yet be able to sustain further population growth for decades or even centuries, but he did not believe it would be able to do so forever.

The solution to humanity’s “irresponsible” population growth, he decided, was to strip people everywhere of their capacity for having so many children. To this end, he ordered Klahn and the other researchers to begin tailoring a contraceptive virus that would prevent women from being able to have more than two children in the natural way. On what O’Donnell said he was certain would be very rare occasions when sustaining the global human population would require women to have more than two children, he believed using a few artificial impregnation methods developed for wealthy people in technologically sophisticated civilizations over the last several decades should be more than sufficient to make up for the shortfall; and though he left this last part of his plan unspoken, he considered people from poorer and less technologically advanced cultures not being granted access to these methods a feature rather than a flaw of it.

Klahn, nonetheless, had little trouble reading between the lines of these instructions from his immediate superior; and he was not happy with any part of this plan or the elitist intentions underlying it. That its elitist motivations were highly discriminatory and likely more than a little racist was bad enough, but the true deal-breaker for him was the means by which this plan’s ends would have to be achieved. Put simply, he knew of absolutely no modification to women’s genetics or epigenetics their virus could deliver that would be capable of preventing women from conceiving any more babies after the first two, only of one that could prevent them from carrying further babies to term by provoking their immune systems into hyperactivity.

Though he didn’t truly share any of O’Donnell’s Malthusian pessimism about humanity’s future, Klahn could appreciate his reasons for desiring to curtail its long-term population growth. He certainly agreed the world would be a better place for everyone if people had to put some conscious effort into having enough children to keep their populations from contracting. Where they inevitably and irreconcilably parted ways was on how they were to achieve this end.

From many vitriolic arguments he’d had with his immediate superior over their project’s ethics, Klahn knew O’Donnell wouldn’t care how many millions or even billions of unborn babies—especially if they were the offspring of what he deemed to be “inferior” people—would have to die for him to achieve his utopian dream of the eugenic “stabilization” of humanity’s population. “You’ve always told me you wanted to put an end to the abortion industry,” he would say, “and, well, if every fetus who makes it to birth is not only a wanted child but a needed child, those abortionists will be out of business in no time! As for those unfortunate third children who miscarry, they’ll pass quietly from this world unnoticed in the same natural way so many millions already do now every year; no more being torn apart piece by tiny piece while struggling to escape the suction tube, or taking hours to die in extreme agony after the saline solution burns off all their skin, or being boiled to death in their own amniotic fluid, or having their skulls crushed, or scissors jammed into the backs of their heads and their brains vacuumed out the way you’ve so graphically described to me so many times before. If the current situation is so atrocious as you say, how exactly could so many quiet miscarriages not be an improvement over that?”

Klahn knew he could not refute any of these arguments; yet all the same, he did not want so many unborn babies’ deaths—painless and peaceful as they might be—on his conscience. To this end, he had already worked out an alternative plan. It was a plan he was certain no one else would even have considered, and he was just as certain no one at the lab—including O’Donnell, most importantly—would ever have agreed to it if he were to explain it in full; but it was a viable alternative, and from his point of view, a most ethically superior one.

Trying to program a woman’s capacity for childbearing to switch off like a circuit breaker once a certain number were born, in Klahn’s opinion, was entirely the wrong approach from the start. For all the similarities between their DNA and binary computer coding, humans were no mere machines to be reprogrammed every time someone wanted them to serve a new function. Rather than try to add a cut-off function where nature had never had any reason to provide one, therefore, he preferred to modify an existing biological function’s longevity: the window of time for childbearing that came between menarche and menopause in every normal human female.

If a genetic or epigenetic modification could shorten these childbearing years down to just two or three years rather than the twenty to thirty that were standard now, people would have to make use of any and every opportunity available to them—“strike while the iron is hot,” as Klahn’s own rather rustic parents had always liked to say—if they were to have any children at all in the natural way. So, casually disregarding O’Donnell’s orders to engineer a “contraceptive” virus, he began researching how to make a “shorten the time for childbearing” virus instead. His findings, after studying the relevant parts of the human genome and using a computer modeling program to simulate how they were likely to react to being modified in various ways, both dismayed and delighted him.

Put simply, his simulations showed that certain modifications to the female genome could indeed significantly delay the onset of menarche (and puberty in general) and likewise accelerate the arrival of menopause; but they could only be delayed and accelerated into the early twenties and early thirties, respectively, still granting any female mutated in this manner an estimated ten to twelve years to have children if she hurried. While Klahn might have been willing to settle for such a partial achievement if this were entirely his own project, he knew these results would not be enough by themselves to satisfy O’Donnell. Besides, he prided himself for always being thorough, and never compromising until he absolutely had to, which he was not convinced he did as yet.

So now Klahn tried a slightly different approach to the problem: premature menopause, so he had read in various medical journals, was especially common in women who had gone through precocious puberty, possibly because their reproductive systems were simply aging more rapidly. What if a girl’s reproductive system—and only that part of her—could be induced to age so rapidly that puberty and menopause would only be two to three years apart? How early in her life such a rapid aging would bring her menarche, the simulations could not tell him; but earlier was better so far as he was concerned, for if all two or three of the years in which a girl could have children the natural way came and went before she was even a teenager, people would have to put some very serious thought and effort indeed into having enough children to sustain their population.

Klahn knew O’Donnell and his colleagues at the lab would have been horrified if they knew what he was speculating, and frankly even found the notion a bit unsettling himself. How low might the ages of menarche and menopause go? Would the parents and guardians of these sexually precocious girls be sufficiently pragmatic to accept that they needed to have their babies while they still could, even if that meant having them while they were still little girls?

Other men would never have dared even contemplate releasing this “precocity virus” his sequencing program had now developed for him, but Klahn was not those other men, and he had not developed his virus solely out of academic curiosity or humanitarian altruism. At heart, deep beneath the seemingly conventional “family man” sexuality of his (mostly) respectably married exterior, he was secretly a latent pedophile with a fetish for child reproduction; not merely for the sight of a girl having a “baby bulge” before she was even into her teens—though he certainly did find the thought of that highly erotic—but for every part of the process of a child having a child. The extremely forbidden act of conception, the roughly nine months of gestation, and finally the delivery—just thinking of these things was always enough to turn him on.

As a security measure, the lab’s sequencer was programmed to require a password from each and every one of the researchers in the lab before it would produce an actual physical copy of the genetic code from any file loaded into its virtual memory. However, since the technician who had designed and programmed this sequencer had been foresighted enough to realize any of these dozen researchers who knew these passwords unexpectedly dying or otherwise having their memories incapacitated would render the passwords unrecoverable and the machine unusable, he had insisted on having each of their passwords printed on military-style “dog tags” which were then to be locked in each of the personal wall safes assigned to each of the researchers. Each of these in turn had a combination lock with the combination known only to its owner; but in the event its owner was no longer able to provide that combination, the lock could be drilled out over about an hour with the proper equipment under the watchful eye of a security camera.

O’Donnell’s authority extending to the lab’s security as well as its operations, however, he and Klahn had successfully subverted these security measures. Spoofing the camera and using a stethoscope to listen to each safe’s tumblers until they got the combinations, they acquired all the passwords for themselves and together used them to add an internet-accessible backdoor to the security program. The only remaining security measure after that which kept them from using the sequencer for unauthorized projects was their mild mutual distrust for each other; the backdoor was flagged with a logger to keep a log of its use, and would routinely send a copy of this log to their home computers every day at six o’clock in the evening.

By the time O’Donnell found out just exactly what kind of virus his colleague had created with his unauthorized use of the sequencer, it was already too late to prevent its spread. In fact, since the report had only come in at the end of the day when Klahn infected himself with his new precocity virus, it had already been spreading for more than 24 hours by the time his superior called him into his office to account for himself. Far from being at all equivocating or evasive about it, he proudly proclaimed everything he had done, explaining it all in exquisite detail—except, of course, some of the finer points of his motives for doing it.

As Klahn expected, O’Donnell was furious, though seemingly not so much for his having flouted his superior’s authority by working behind his back as that he’d blown off his original assignment and subverted the project by producing an outcome similar to and yet very different from the intended one. He particularly berated him for how reckless he’d been to release a virus without knowing precisely what it would do. In a tone that sounded much more accusing than inquisitive, he demanded “And supposing it gives those girls their periods at the age of five, or six? What then?”

“Then I guess they’d better start making babies, since by the time they hit ten, they won’t be able to have any more,” Klahn answered, trying not to smirk.

O’Donnell’s mouth quivered and his eyes twitched as he tried to maintain his composure. “Get out of my sight,” he growled. “You are hereby dismissed for the remainder of the day while I decide... whether to make your dismissal permanent!”

Klahn’s smile turned a little darker as he maintained as calm and even a tone as he could. “Think carefully before you act, sir,” he said. “In time, I think you will come to see that I’m right, and you’ve got what you wanted.”

“I said... get out!”

Nodding his head ever so slightly, as if to curtsy, Klahn turned and walked out without another word. Whatever O’Donnell might decide, the precocity virus was now loose in every one of the suburbs of Seattle where he and his fellow researchers at the lab lived; and from there, it would soon spread to both the city and the country, and then to the entire planet. What was done could not be undone: not even he who’d created the virus could keep it from ultimately spreading to both the most sophisticated urbanites in the largest cities and the most primitive tribal peoples in the remotest dwellings in the world.

Asymptomatic: what a beautiful word that was to Klahn; the bacteria and viruses most widespread in humanity were the ones that produced no symptoms, attracted none of the human immune system’s attention, and made no immediately obvious changes whatsoever to their hosts’ health and anatomy. The precocity virus was airborne, provoked no immune response, and was completely asymptomatic for at least a year. Even if O’Donnell dared to risk announcing the new pandemic that had originated at his lab at a public press conference, and even if enough people believed his announcement, chances were nobody would even try to do anything to slow or stop its spread; for what could they possibly do, even if very many of them considered such an initially innocuous virus to be a genuine threat to humanity?

When Klahn’s wife wondered why he was home early that day, he told her only that he had been given the day off, and refused to explain any further despite her prodding. Instead of surfing the internet or reading a book as he usually did in his leisure time, he spent some time mowing the lawn, and then went shopping for an ingredient his wife said she needed to complete the recipe for a dish she was making for their dinner that night. After dinner, he joined his wife in watching a romantic movie on their streaming service she’d been wanting to see, and afterward took her to bed for several very lively rounds of lovemaking.

The next morning, he awoke early to find his wife already up and busy making breakfast; not something she was in the habit of doing, but then she hadn’t been in the habit of having so much fun in bed as she’d had last night either. After breakfast, to allay any further suspicions she might have, he decided to pretend he was going to work as usual. Discreetly carrying his cell phone (which he usually didn’t take with him to work, since it couldn’t get any reception down in the lab), he parked his car near an elementary school playground and listened to the radio as he waited for O’Donnell to call.

Klahn had finished the lunch his wife had packed for him, and watched several waves of children come out to the playground for their recesses (they seemed to be grouped by their grade) before he finally got the call he was expecting. When he picked up, the voice on the other end was not O’Donnell’s, however. It was one of his coworkers informing him of a most sudden and unexpected development.

O’Donnell was dead. He had left the lab very suddenly without explanation that morning, and (the others at the lab had just now learned) driven himself to the emergency room at a nearby hospital, only to collapse into a fevered delirium upon arrival. Though the physicians there had done their best to keep him alive, everything they tried was in vain; they had never seen a disease so fast-moving and instantly fatal as this before.

The hospital had just recently notified O’Donnell’s wife, and she in turn had only notified the lab just now. Considering that Klahn was now their acting director, the coworker was asking him whether he might come in and tell them what to do next. Shocked as he was at this turn of events, he immediately responded that he was on his way and would be seeing them soon, and then hung up.

On his way to the lab, Klahn felt a strange and potent mixture of emotions swirling inside of him: a buzz of shock and fright in his spine, the feel of his heart sinking in grief and sorrow within his chest, a bizarre flutter of elation in his head. He could hardly believe what he’d just heard, and yet at the same time his mind was already clouding with suspicion as to a likely cause of his late superior’s sudden death. All the while, at the back of his mind and yet growing more intense in its clamoring for attention was the realization that he was in charge now that the man who’d lately been thinking to fire him was gone.

Then, as he was at the gate of the fence around the tiny above-ground building containing the elevator to the lab (and little else), Klahn realized he was also at a loss for what to do next: what does the acting superior say to his subordinates when their former superior has just died? He was still trying to think what to say when the elevator stopped and the doors reopened to reveal everyone at the lab gathered in the hall and waiting for him. Somehow, he suddenly came up with a few ideas of what he should say.

“I see that we have all been informed of Doctor Phillip O’Donnell’s sudden passing,” he said. “I know we’re all going to miss him. At the moment, I’m as shocked and saddened and at a loss for what to do as any of you.”

Klahn felt his heart sinking a little further as he saw several of his fellow researchers exchanging uneasy glances while he talked, but he also felt his resolve rising.

“Until we all get a few things sorted out, I doubt we’re going to be able to concentrate on our work very well, so I recommend that you all take the rest of the week off. Since you are all exempt employees, you won’t be docked any of your pay or benefits. I’ll be in touch with his family, and if you wish to send them your condolences, you can send them from here through me, and I’ll see that they get them at the proper time and place.”

Now the tension was breaking, and Klahn saw hints of relief on everyone’s face, and felt himself relaxing as well.

“For now, everybody wrap up what you were doing if you haven’t already, because we’re shutting down the lab for today. If anyone needs to contact me, I’ll be here taking care of some paperwork for the rest of the week, but don’t call unless it’s urgent and can’t wait; use your email for everything else. Now, let’s be on our way...”

As instructed, they all went back to their desks and started gathering up their coats and other personal belongings and shutting down their computers. Soon, they were all waving their farewells to each other, and everyone but Klahn got into the elevator and left for the surface. He was once again alone.

As soon as they were gone, Klahn went to his office and called up the sequencer’s logs on his computer. As he anticipated, the logs showed the sequencer had been accessed and used very early that morning. What he did not anticipate was seeing that it had also been accessed and used several hours earlier the evening before.

As a precautionary measure when they had installed the logger program along with their backdoor access, O’Donnell had insisted that the logs record nothing about the user’s name or his location. Since only the two of them knew about the “enhancement” they’d installed, he insisted, they would always know which of them had used it without having to be told. As remote as the possibility was, if some computer-savvy individual were ever to discover their hack to the system during some kind of audit or investigation or the like, said discoverer would never be able to find any clues—let alone proof that would stand up in a court case—linking them to their handiwork.

At the time, this had seemed a very reasonable precaution to Klahn, but now it left him with a bit of a mystery: why would O’Donnell have run the sequencer twice? Calling up the lab’s security cameras’ records (which, unlike the sequencer’s, were readily available to everyone who worked at the lab), he observed that his late superior had not arrived at work any earlier than usual that morning, which meant he couldn’t possibly have made any use of whatever the sequencer had produced in that first run the previous night. Since the sequencer’s operating chip was hard-coded to scour and sterilize its synthesis chamber of all contents before making a new run, whatever the first run had produced had been irretrievably lost during the second run, much as the file loaded into its virtual memory (on a solid state drive) during that first run had been irretrievably overwritten when the sequencer loaded a new file for its second run.

Laying that mystery aside for the moment, Klahn could at least retrieve the file for that second run to find out what exactly the sequencer had produced. Cross-referencing the genetic sequence in the file with various other files in the lab’s archives brought a swift resolution to one mystery while revealing another: according to this analysis, the last product the sequencer had synthesized had been one of the “null” viruses loaded with a sequence from a deadly plague and targeted toward a specific human individual’s genome to turn it into an assassination virus. As the analysis stubbornly insisted when he ran it again just to be certain, the victim it targeted had been none other than Doctor Phillip O’Donnell himself.

Though the facts laid out before him remained unchanging and unquestionable, Klahn still struggled to believe the conclusion toward which they were driving him. Could O’Donnell really have used his own invention to commit such a horrible suicide? That was insanely out of character for him—beyond insane, really, utter lunacy!

If his late superior had been planning to start assassinating people he didn’t like using his viruses, Klahn was quite certain he would have been the first on O’Donnell’s list. The man had no history of clinical depression, had been quite proud of his achievements, and had in fact had a rather high opinion in general of himself. He had every reason to want his life to continue, and absolutely none to want it to end; surely he could not have been intending to kill himself.

Such was what Klahn believed, and what he told the told the officer investigating his late superior’s suspicious death—absent the details about how exactly O’Donnell had been able to override all the sequencer’s security measures to produce the virus that killed him without having to notify and seek authorization from anyone else. Hence, he was in fact being completely honest with the investigator during his debriefing, though he did have to tap-dance around some of the more classified parts of his research when—for instance—reassuring the man that the pathogen which had struck down his former superior would not be able to kill anyone else on the entire planet, without being at liberty to explain exactly why, or how he knew this. In turn, when the investigator made his report to his superiors (most of whom were also among the lab’s political and military administrators), they were certain his investigation had been as thorough as possible and satisfied with his ruling—improbable as it seemed—that Doctor Phillip O’Donnell’s death had been wholly accidental.

Meanwhile, though these administrators now had a tiny vial with a sample of the virus that had killed O’Donnell (discreetly recovered from his corpse before it was buried with full honors) safely stashed away in a top secret storage facility where it would most likely never see the light of day again, nobody ever even came close to discovering the precocity virus Klahn had loosed on the unsuspecting peoples of the world. Since its effects would take a year for anyone to notice, let alone his superiors, he was also certain no one would ever trace it back to him. Though his somber grief at his friend’s funeral and throughout the subsequent investigation was genuine enough, he was simultaneously struggling all the while to conceal the spring in his step thinking of the radical transformation humanity would be experiencing in just a few months; an imminent turning point in human history he—and none but he—knew was coming.

So he thought.


	2. Crisis

The world’s fertility rates had already been slacking off for many decades, so the sudden nosedive in the number of women getting pregnant around the world initially raised fewer of its various demographers’ and fertility experts’ eyebrows than perhaps it should have. Only as this shift in humanity’s reproductive fortunes began to affect various industries’ financial fortunes did these professionals begin to sit up and take notice: personal trainers for pregnant women, doctors and nurses at maternity wards, midwives, and—as the late Doctor Phillip O’Donnell had foreseen—abortionists began to hemorrhage customers, revenue, and employment. Meanwhile, industries legitimate and otherwise that purveyed products and services for helping women get pregnant—from properly licensed fertility clinics with a long track record of success to the shadiest fly-by-night mail-order outlets with a long track record of successfully conning desperate and gullible victims out of their life savings—experienced a massive influx of new customers seeking their remedies along with former employees from those other failing industries seeking—and often finding—new employment with them.

Though the entire world was suffering from this terrible shortage of fecundity, it never had any shortage of explanations. Conspiracy theorists of various stripes blamed everything from fluoridation and growth hormones and other environmentally unwholesome chemicals secretly being slipped into their food and drink, to heightened levels of radiation in the land or sea or sky due to leaky nuclear power plants or new cellular technology or government-sponsored terrorists secretly punching holes in the ozone layer using weather control devices. Others of a somewhat more superstitious bent claimed nature itself was punishing humanity for its many transgressions against the environment; as with previous crises such as climate change and COVID-19, their proposed solution was that people everywhere were to yield up their lives, liberties, and property to the control of an all-powerful scientifically organized global government in which (of course) they would be the predominant ruling officials.

Still others of somewhat more traditional religiously apocalyptic persuasions claimed that an angry God or council of gods was smiting humanity for its various transgressions. In the East, Hindu mystics spoke of the end of this present Kali Yuga, and predicted a drop in life expectancy would soon accompany the precipitous decline in fertility as Vishnu’s final avatar Kalki was now being reborn into this world to cleanse it of its many terrible sinners and usher in the new Satya Yuga. In the West, more charismatic strains of Christianity and Islam spoke of this crisis as the just deserts of the arrogantly decadent and sinful societies surrounding them, and of how their imminent downfall for lack of children heralded the end of the world and the Messiah’s return; or (in Shiite Islam’s case) the long-awaited Mahdi’s arrival.

Among both the credulous and the skeptical, in secular and religious quarters alike, many also went looking for various people and institutions to blame: feminists and sodomites and other sexually libertine perverts featured prominently in the demonology of many apocalyptic religious adherents, particularly Christians and Muslims. The more “secular” environmentally apocalyptic types directed their ire toward “climate deniers” and “science deniers” and other reprobates they accused of being complicit in planetary genocide for refusing to submit to the global governance of such morally and scientifically superior specimens of humanity as themselves. The conspiracy theorists of a more anarchic bent typically blamed the crisis (and everything else that ever went wrong in their lives) on government forces both real and imaginary, some claiming that this crisis was due to a secret government lab somewhere having developed a population-control pathogen that had then either escaped or been deliberately released to infect all humanity.

The usual tensions between classes, races, and nationalities played a significant role in all of this finger-pointing as well, of course: various race hustlers in North America and Europe, as usual, somehow blamed the white man for everything; white male supremacists, in turn, blamed everyone with a darker or duskier shade of skin for humanity’s “degradation” and white women besides for having failed to “do their duty” to their race by having babies while they were still in their prime childbearing years. In Asia, people from just about every other country blamed the Chinese, claiming they were probably behind all of this somehow just as they’d been behind the global “Wuhan Virus” outbreak of 2020; and just as it had back then, the Chinese government tried to deflect all of this blame by accusing the United States of having engineered this crisis, probably in some kind of secret military lab for making bio-weapons. In the United States, meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans accused each other of “incompetence” for failing to anticipate the onset of this latest crisis, third parties blamed them both, and a substantial number of demagogues and rabble-rousing lunatics from nearly all parts of the ideological spectrum somehow managed to come up with excuses to blame this whole mess on “Zionists,” by which (of course) they meant Jews.

What all the blame-shifting and finger-pointing couldn’t help was the rapidly burgeoning population of young women who should have been in their prime years for childbearing instead experiencing menopause and its commonly associated miseries (such as hot flashes, lethargy, and the occasional mood swing) extremely prematurely as their ovaries ceased to produce any more sex hormones and release any more viably fertile eggs. Like the fertility clinics, pharmacies and their suppliers managed to ramp up their hiring and production rapidly enough to meet the rising demand for their hormone replacement therapy products; but also like those fertility clinics, they could only do for these newly post-menopausal women what they could do for any woman once she was out of her childbearing years. Regardless of a female’s age when menopause struck—and it was striking younger and younger women by the month, would likely be striking teenagers soon if the current trends were any indication—the physicians and pharmacists at fertility clinics could only get her pregnant using the same dauntingly expensive in vitro fertilization technology they’d previously used on any sufficiently determined woman who could afford it.

In those previous times, the greatest expense had almost always been the implantation cycles: running in the tens of thousands of dollars per trial with never a guarantee of success, and all too often ending in failure despite everyone’s best efforts. Now, however, the most prohibitive expense lay in harvesting a viably fertile egg: few of the newly barren women clamoring for a child to call their own had been foresighted or fortunate enough to have frozen any eggs of their own while they were still fertile, and few of the still-fertile younger women who might otherwise have been donors were contributing to the fertility clinics’ supplies, as most were already seizing what they rightly saw as their last chance to have any children of their own by getting pregnant the natural way while they still could. Formerly powerful and vocal political and legal resistance to adoptive gestation now crumbled under the weight of market forces as fertility clinics began brazenly auctioning off to the highest bidder any “leftover” frozen embryos their more successful clients neglected to pay to keep in storage for themselves; this first with salutary neglect and then outright support from many governments as politicians started pressing for the repeal of all laws and regulations that stood in the way of their women having more children while they still could.

Such was how the more affluent people in more technologically advanced nations dealt with their sudden dearth of fecundity, but globally, these were a tiny percent of a tiny percent of humanity; even in the wealthiest of nations, such technological assistance was financially out of reach for the vast majority of the populace. Apart from a few of the world’s most intellectually insulated and willfully ignorant fools (most of them to be found in academia), everyone in the world with a working mind—from the most educated and privileged to the most ignorant and destitute—began to realize the world was running out of babies; and if this worrisome worldwide trend toward universal infertility continued unchecked, even the privileged few who could afford to purchase fertile eggs from the less privileged would be hard-pressed to find enough of these eggs to harvest to produce enough babies to keep the human race from dwindling to extinction. Clearly, people needed to find a more natural—or at least inexpensive—way for common folks to start having babies again.

While everyone was still adjusting to this first crisis, the second crisis struck almost just as suddenly and without warning: girls worldwide experiencing premature menarche at painfully young ages. While it had not been entirely uncommon for girls in parts of Europe and North America to experience menarche in their preteen years due to some nebulous combination of the advanced nutrition and psychosomatic effects derived from living in affluent modern societies, precocious puberty in girls now became a worldwide phenomenon, and the average age for menarche proceeded to nosedive into the single digits. By the time this terrifying new trend came to global professionals’ attention, the new average age for a girl to reach menarche was about three months past her fifth birthday, and any girl who’d reached age ten without beginning to menstruate now had to be considered a late bloomer.

The same reproductive experts who’d been the first to sound the alarm over the first crisis were also the first to speculate—accurately, if somewhat hastily—about a connection between that trend and this new one. The sudden global rash of precocious puberty in girls followed the worldwide outbreak of infertility in women by only about a year, and if one adjusted the charts to compensate for this delay, the trend lines in both were nearly identical. Most telling of all, the last girls recorded to have begun menstruating in their teens had done so at a virtually identical time and rate as the last women recorded to have reached menopause past the age of thirty.

Though the social mores of the more affluent and technologically advanced nations kept scientists there from examining very many girls under the age of eighteen, anthropologists and other kinds of social researchers from the poorer and less advanced nations with more relaxed social mores soon confirmed the reproductive experts’ worst fears: many girls in these poorer nations were now reaching menopause before they would be old enough to graduate from high school (if they’d been able to afford it), and these “early quitters” (as the researchers called them) had mostly begun menstruating only four or five years before they’d stopped. Preliminary data gynecologists in the more advanced nations had discreetly gathered from the many little girls whose worried parents had brought them in to be examined after they had their first periods in grade school also confirmed the most likely and obvious explanation: every last human female’s reproductive system worldwide was aging at a horrifically accelerated rate, leaving only a short window of time for them to have children the natural way. In all probability, the kindergarten and preschool girls currently undergoing precocious puberty would reach menopause before they graduated from elementary school.

In some Islamic theocracies—such as Pakistan—and a few other rather primitive parts of the world where child brides and child marriages were still deemed to be morally and socially acceptable, this finding raised only a few eyebrows at most. In the rest of the world, the public’s shock and outrage beggared all description: would girls still young enough to be playing with dolls now have to get pregnant in order to save the human race? The barely feasible alternative the experts announcing this finding offered was also barely any more palatable to the scandalized public: to harvest these painfully young girls’ ova while they were still fertile, and either fertilize and implant them in more appropriately aged women now, or freeze them to be fertilized and implanted in the girls themselves later when they were sufficiently mature.

As with the infertility crisis, the global controversy over this precocity crisis produced a lot of blame-casting, finger-pointing, and scapegoating, but no better solutions than the ones the experts had already proposed. Cures—or even treatments—for the girls’ and women’s rapidly aging reproductive systems were likely to take years to develop if they could even be developed at all, given how little use anything these experts had discovered so far had been to anyone. Even if their research did ultimately find a way to halt the premature aging in female reproductive systems, the almost certainly irreversible damage would already be done, and nearly every womb on the planet rendered barren.


	3. Bleeding

In the rural backwaters of Alabama lived the Williamson family: Jim and his wife Megan, their fifth grader son Dan, and their first grader daughter Elisa. Though Mr. and Mrs. Williamson had previously enjoyed living in a suburb a short commute away from downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota, the COVID-19 pandemic and racial riots of 2020 had convinced them—like so many other urban and suburban dwellers—to flee the cities for the tall timbers. With the rapid rise of teleconferencing technology during the pandemic, the kind of work the family’s breadwinner Jim had previously done in a large office building in the middle of Minneapolis before the pandemic was now just as easy to do from anywhere in the world he could get a decent internet connection... such as the pleasant country cottage in an as-yet unincorporated part of Alabama which his family now called home.

Shortly after the Williamsons moved into the house they’d purchased sight-unseen (which fortunately didn’t have too many things wrong with it), a local boy just a few months older than Dan by the name of Jack Williams struck up a friendship with him, and through this connection, the rest of the Williamson family gradually came to be introduced to the neighboring Williams family almost half a mile down the road from them. Though the geographic distance could be a bit daunting at times, and Dan’s parents didn’t much approve of Jack’s introducing their son to the risks and rewards of driving a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, Jack’s parents Joe and Francis and his little sisters Clara and Chloe were so friendly and welcoming to the whole Williamson family in their own homegrown down-to-earth way that they all naturally came to be good friends. Joe helped Jim learn some of the basic skills he needed to live in the country, Francis and Megan spent a lot of their time “chewing the rag” and swapping family recipes, and Elisa’s playing with Clara and Chloe kept all the girls from spending so much time annoying their older brothers as they previously had.

Another subject Dan’s parents weren’t exactly ecstatic to find out Jack had introduced to their son was that of his sexual education. The Williams family owned several goats and kids and a couple of watchdogs they regularly bred for puppies to sell when the female was in her season, and when Jack allowed Dan to see for himself how these animals made their babies, he naturally began to wonder about how humans made theirs. Megan was especially unhappy that her little baby boy should be learning so much so soon, but Jim pointed out to her that after all, their son had to learn these things sooner or later; and though he did think Dan should also have some book learning on the subject, he could certainly do worse than to learn the facts of life from such an organic and down-to-earth source.

Moreover, when Jim gave Dan some books to read in response to his questions (which he and Jack proceeded to study quite closely and with far greater diligence than anything they had ever been assigned at school), he was actually rather disgusted once he’d connected all the dots and realized what his parents had done to conceive him. Struggling to conceal her delight at this reaction, his mother simply pointed out that almost everybody he knew (yes, including Jack) had been conceived more or less the same way, thereby grossing him out even further. That night in bed, after gleefully doing an “instant replay” of Dan’s conception (as Jim put it), Megan happily admitted to her husband that all her misgivings about his calm and casual approach to their son’s sex education had been unfounded.

“So you told him _almost_ everybody is conceived that way. Did he think to ask about the exceptions?” asked Jim.

“No. I think he was still too preoccupied with how ‘gross’ it was that we did, you know, _this_ when we were making him,” said Megan.

“Ah, he’ll come around eventually. It took me a while too when I was his age.”

“Really? You were about his age when you found this out?”

“Well, yes, technically. Those books are a family heirloom, you know: I got most of my own sex education from them.”

“When you were _ten_?”

“Ten and a half. I never thought to ask them, but I think Mom and Dad deliberately left them lying out for me. I was a shy and lonely bookworm back then, you see, and didn’t have a lot of friends.”

“Still, you’re kinda blowing my mind here. You sure didn’t seem so experienced when I first met you.”

“That’s because I wasn’t. Knowing about something you’ve read isn’t quite the same thing as truly understanding it, you know. I didn’t discover girls until I was thirteen.”

“But you just said—”

“I said I found out about sex. That’s not the same thing as discovering girls; not the same thing at all.”

“So, my little boy Dan...?”

“He says it’s gross, remember? Since he gets that from his old man, I can assure you he’s quite sincere about that. He knows how it’s done; that doesn’t mean he knows why he’d want to do it.”

“Well, that makes me feel a little bit better.”

For a few minutes, there was a lull in the conversation. Then Jim spoke up.

“You know, I never thought to ask before, but... when did you first figure it out?”

“About sex? When I got my first period. I think I was about twelve... and a half.”

“So, not even a teenager yet.”

“Well, I was going to be pretty soon! Besides, like you, that didn’t mean I’d discovered boys yet. I still thought they were all disgusting little trolls; I couldn’t imagine wanting to open my legs for any of them.”

“And that changed...?”

“When I was thirteen... and a half. I got my first crush; it helped that he was fifteen and looked like he should have been in a boy band.”

“I don’t remember you ever mentioning that guy before.”

“That’s because nothing became of it; I just sort of sat around fantasizing as I ogled him from afar. Besides, he was my cousin... sort of. You know my cousin Shirley? He was her half-brother from my uncle’s previous marriage. Since that uncle was only my uncle from having married my mother’s sister, I guess you could say he was my half-cousin, or something like that.”

“Half-cousin, eh? ‘Sweet home, Alabama...!’”

Pulling the pillow out from under her head, Megan whacked him in the face with it. “Stop that! You know Joe and Francis are cousins, and you can see their family’s turned out just fine.”

Jim laughed as he fended off several further whacks from Megan’s pillow. “Oh ho! So maybe instead of marrying me, you should have shaken your family tree and seen if that hot cousin of yours would tumble out.”

“ _Half_ -cousin... and yes, maybe I should have!” Megan swung harder until Jim finally put a stop to her attacks by grabbing the pillow.

“But, well... who am I to talk? I thought my cousin Amber was pretty hot when I was just fifteen.”

“For real?” Megan stopped struggling to get her pillow back. “Wait, wasn’t she twelve when you were fifteen?”

“And a half! Actually, more like three quarters. She was _almost_ thirteen!”

“Almost only counts for horseshoes and hand grenades. So, you’ve been chasing jail bait your whole life? What’s the theme song for that?”

“‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ by The Police, probably; but hey, I robbed the cradle when I married you, and that turned out just fine!”

Feeling Jim’s hold on the pillow relax, Megan suddenly snatched it away and swung for his face again. “You pervert!”

Laughing, he blocked her attack and then wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug and planted a kiss on her lips. Megan put up an admirable struggle trying to squirm free, but when she suddenly felt his newly reinvigorated one-eyed pirate poking up against the entrance to her feminine treasure, she opened her legs and thrust down hard to welcome her plunderer. After she and he did an “instant replay” of how they’d also conceived little Elisa, the two laid themselves out on top of the blankets, basking in the afterglow of their rather hot and sweaty activity.

“You know,” said Jim, when he’d finally cooled down enough to want to slip back under the covers, “we haven’t done it twice in a single night in a very long time.”

Megan smirked. “Think maybe those ‘instant replays’ will bring Elisa a little sister?”

“Or a little brother. Maybe he can teach her what it’s like for Dan when she pesters him.”

“If that’s the reason for having another one, you should definitely be hoping for it to be a little girl. Almost everything my older sister and I ever did growing up was fussing and fighting with each other.”

“Well, I never had a sister, so I wouldn’t know, but I do know I used to hassle my bigger brothers all the time when I was a kid; but only out of revenge, because they liked to torment me too.”

“Here’s to revenge on older siblings!” Megan stole a kiss from Jim as she slid back under the covers.

Megan skipped her period that month, and then the next month too. When it still didn’t arrive the month after that, she was quite certain she was now carrying another little brother or sister for Dan and Elisa, though she hadn’t gained a single pound and her lower abdomen showed no signs of swelling. Then she and Jim began to see reports on their favorite news sites about the global spike in cases of premature menopause and the consequent unfolding of a new worldwide fertility crisis.

Down the road at nearly the same time, Francis began to experience hot flashes just like the ones she said her late mother—and her mother’s mother before her—had experienced for the rest of their lives once they were out of their childbearing years. Fearing the worst, Megan tried to make an appointment with each of a number of gynecologists in neighboring counties, only to learn all their schedules were already full to overflowing with other women frightened that they might be experiencing premature menopause. Even without being able to get a formal diagnosis, Megan’s fears were now confirmed: she and her neighbor Francis were almost certainly going through menopause in their early thirties, and would never be able to conceive children naturally ever again; the global crisis had come home to them.

Her hopes dashed and her heart heavy with disappointment, Megan decided she and Jim would just have to learn to be content with raising the two children they’d already had. She began spending even more time chatting with Francis and commiserating over their childbearing woes, and started being a little friendlier and more welcoming to Jack when he came to visit her son. When Jack turned eleven early that summer, she bought an air rifle and had Dan give it to him as a gift for his birthday; then, when Dan turned eleven in the fall, Jack gave him a rather fancy (and expensive-looking) Swiss army knife with more than a dozen features for his birthday.

Clara’s eighth birthday was just a couple of weeks after that, and though Elisa was the only child from outside the Williams family officially invited to the party (and she brought a gift—a doll Megan had bought her for the occasion), Dan did happen to be visiting with Jack at the same time, and each boy got to have a slice of the cake in return for an easily kept promise not to hassle the girls. They spent most of that day in Jack’s room re-configuring and re-connecting to the internet an old computer Joe had passed on to his son after getting himself a newer one (also used, however; the Williams family tended to be frugal with their purchases). After clearing out the remnants of Joe’s boring old business software and installing some fun “new” video games (all of them gotten for free off abandonware and emulation sites), Dan also helped Jack get all of its internet browsers upgraded to the latest versions available for its old-but-still-quite-functional operating system.

A little over two months later, Francis received a phone call in the middle of the morning from the nurse’s office at the elementary school all the Williams’ and Williamsons’ children were attending asking her to come pick up her daughter Clara who’d just had “an accident” of some sort the nurse neglected to specify. When she arrived about five minutes sooner than she should have if she’d been obeying the local speed limits, Francis found Clara bawling her eyes out and trembling with fright as the nurse repeatedly tried to reassure her that she was not going to die. Upon seeing her mother, the little girl all but flew into her arms for comfort; and as her tears and trembling began to subside, the assistant principal who’d brought her mother in finally began to explain what had happened.

With absolutely no warning whatsoever, Clara had very suddenly gotten her first period; she had felt something “begin to leak” while in a science class, and had politely asked for a hall pass to go to the bathroom as she’d been trained to do. Since the science teacher had been giving a very involved and fascinating demonstration and the homeroom teacher had been down at the teachers’ lounge taking care of some personal business at the time, no one noticed the little second grader had been away from class far too long until the homeroom teacher finally came to fetch her class from the science teacher’s room and her headcount came up a student short. The classmate she sent out to find her (who was also one of Clara’s school friends) found her sitting on the toilet in one of the bathroom stalls, crying because she thought she was bleeding to death, and refusing to come out no matter what her friend said.

When her homeroom teacher (who was in a bit of a quandary herself about what to do) realized what was happening, she’d sent that same classmate (who’d been something less than discreet when telling the teacher in front of all her classmates just exactly why she hadn’t been able to bring Clara back with her) to fetch the school nurse. The nurse, upon realizing the nature of the situation and the discretion it would require, had brusquely thanked the student for all her “help” and ordered her back to class with a stern warning to keep her trap shut about this incident from now on “if she knew what was good for her” before discreetly going down to the bathroom to retrieve the newly pubescent little eight-year-old.

When a calm and (mostly) friendly request proved futile, the nurse finally had to resort to a stern demand to get Clara to open the stall door and let her in. The blubbering little girl was a mess in more ways than one, but with a few kind words and some rather inventive use of copious amounts of toilet paper, the nurse had been able to get her cleaned up enough to get her safely back to the infirmary without having any encounters or further incidents that might embarrass and upset her any further. The bleeding, she assured Mrs. Williams, was nowhere near so terrible as it had initially appeared to be; though she admitted she could understand the poor little girl’s reaction.

“The first day is always the worst, in my experience,” she said, “and no joke, with all that red in the water, she looked like she’d lost half her life’s blood already.” At hearing this, Clara suddenly burst into tears again. “There, there! I’m sorry, girl! I didn’t mean to make things worse for you!” Pulling another tissue from the box on her desk, she handed it to Mrs. Williams to wipe her daughter’s eyes and nose. “You must be thirsty; I dare say you’ve shed more water than blood by now.”

Francis glared at the nurse, but she pretended not to notice. “Anyway, you’ve had a rough morning, Clara, so I’m thinking you should take the rest of the day off; go home, get some rest,” she said. “Things always look better after you’ve had some alone time. I’ll write your teacher a note. Doesn’t that make you feel better already?” First blood had clearly taken its toll on her little daughter: normally, she would have been jumping for joy at hearing she was being permitted to skip school; but Clara’s only response to this was to nod weakly and then bury her face deeper in her mother’s shoulder.

Annoyed as she had been at the school nurse, Francis was relieved to find that her general prognosis had been accurate: the initial flood that had left such an enormous rust-colored stain on Clara’s underwear (which her mother immediately threw into a bucket of cold water to soak the moment they got home) had already slowed to a trickle perceptible only as a tiny fuzzy dot on the makeshift menstrual pad the nurse had made for her from some medical gauze and a square bandage. A brief nap helped take the puffiness from her eyes, and though she was a little cranky for the rest of the day, Clara didn’t cry anymore. She also got rather hungry and thirsty, both for food and drink, and for knowledge: Francis spent a lot of the rest of that day answering questions she hadn’t really expected to have to answer so soon.

Clara was back in school by the next day, thanks to some items her mother had kept from her own days of being “on the rag” as she referred to it. Though the girl’s classmates there found her a little moody and standoffish (especially the one who’d blabbed about her to the teacher in front of her whole homeroom class), she had no trouble with anyone or anything else, even including the stretching exercises the gym teacher had them doing in his class. Though all the adults at her school found her getting her period at so young an age a little unsettling, the school nurse in particular could testify that she’d dealt with no small number of girls who’d gotten theirs at ten; in fact, the girls in the fourth and fifth grades had already been keeping her unusually busy this year with these kinds of problems, which was one reason why she hadn’t had any spare sanitary pads available for Clara that day and had been forced to improvise.

Worse was yet to come, for the very next week, a little first grader who’d just celebrated her seventh birthday two days earlier suddenly started bleeding at recess while out playing on the monkey bars. The very next day, a certain classmate of hers by the name of Elisa Williamson, who was just a couple of weeks away from her own seventh birthday, narrowly avoided suffering an even more humiliating menarche by staying seated at her desk when the rest of her class was lining up to go to another room and stubbornly refusing to get up no matter how her teacher (and several of the other students) threatened her. Only at very nearly the last minute did the teacher suddenly connect the dots and realize why she—and her students—should not force the issue.

After yelling “Get back in line, NOW!” at the obnoxious little boy who’d been on his way over to Elisa’s desk to try to drag her out of her seat, the teacher marched the rest of her class off to their appointment with the math teacher. Returning alone, she found the little holdout still sitting at her desk with her hands in her lap as she’d been when the class left her, but now with the defiant pout on her face dissolving into tears. Quietly closing the classroom door, she sidled up to her student.

“You just punched your ticket for the blood train, didn’t you?” she asked. Then, when she remembered she was talking to a child, she added “Just like your gal pal on the monkey bars yesterday.”

Closing her eyes and looking away, Elisa nodded quietly.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, kid. It happens to all us ladies sooner or later. For you, I guess it was sooner.”

Elisa said nothing.

“Well, we should probably get you to the nurse. She’s the one who’s got all the pads and plugs,” said the teacher, pulling Elisa’s desk away. “Boy, is she gonna be— Whoa!” she suddenly exclaimed, for she had just seen how much blood was seeping between the fingers of the girl’s hands on her crotch. “On second thought, you’ve probably got the right idea here. Sit tight while I go get the nurse, ’kay?”

As anticipated, the school nurse was not at all happy to hear the news, and was even less thrilled to be summoned to a classroom rather than have her patient brought to her office; but she answered the summons all the same. Upon seeing how much blood Elisa had already gotten on the chair, and realizing what a messy trail they would leave walking or even carrying her to the nurse’s office, the nurse decided to enlist the teacher’s help to carry the chair with the girl in it. Then the teacher got an even better idea: she removed a projector from its cart, helped the nurse lift the chair onto that cart instead, and then wheeled this entire arrangement up the hall to the infirmary.

Though Elisa stayed hunched over in her seat all the way, mortified at the possibility someone might see her in such a messy condition, she actually giggled a bit when the principal met them at the side door to his office (through which they had to pass to get to the nurse’s office in the back) and she saw the look on his face and heard him say “Well, here’s something we don’t see every day around here!”

“Seems another little first grader just joined the Cherry Slush Club,” the nurse explained.

“Again? You know, this pattern I’m seeing here is really starting to creep me out...”

“Heh, you’re telling me!” said the teacher. “The one you had here yesterday was from my class too.”

“Well, don’t let me slow you down,” muttered the principal, opening the door and holding it for them as they wheeled Elisa through.

By the time her mommy arrived to pick her up from school, all of Elisa’s blood had been cleaned away from her crotch area (and from the chair, which her homeroom teacher had already carried back to her classroom where it belonged), she had been fitted with a sanitary pad, and her teacher had helpfully fetched her jacket from her cubbyhole for her to wear around her waist while she waited. Her eyes were dry, though the areas around them were still puffy from all the crying she’d done; the nurse had also supplied her with a tissue for her runny nose. Despite her irritation at the disruption to her schedule and being disturbed at hearing her little daughter had begun to bleed at so young an age, Megan was almost glowing with heartfelt approval for the school nurse when she saw how competently and efficiently she had dealt with this crisis.

Though Megan still had a menstrual cup left over from her own “visits from Aunt Flo” as she referred to them, she strongly doubted it was going to fit properly in her little girl any time soon. Since Elisa was still too young to keep track of the time very effectively, tampons—even the “minis” designed specifically for younger and smaller girls—were also out of the question in Megan’s opinion. Instead, after they got home and Elisa was properly bathed and changed and they’d had lunch, they went shopping at the nearest big box store (which was about half an hour’s drive away) for some machine-washable reusable pads to replace the disposable one the nurse had given her.

Like her friend Clara, Elisa was back in school the next day with only a slightly snappish attitude toward some of her more overly inquisitive classmates (especially that one jerk from the previous day who’d threatened to drag her from her seat) to mark this momentous turning point in her life. Though none of the students in the school had seen her on her trip up the hall, thanks to pretty much everyone being in class at the time, gossip about the little girls from the first and second grades who’d started bleeding in school was already spreading from grade to grade, class to class, and individual to individual like wildfire. By the end of that week, pretty much everyone in the school knew the reason she’d been allowed to go home early on that one particular day.

When Clara and Elisa realized they now had one more thing in common with each other, they invited the other girl who’d gotten her period during recess to come sit with them when they had one of their regular meetings at lunch. Having felt singled out and suspicious that everyone was talking about her behind her back after that incident, the girl was initially rather hesitant to accept their invitation, but then very happy and relieved when she did; for when they’d each told their stories of what had happened to them, she started realizing she was not and had never been singled out in all the gossiping nearly all the other girls in the school were indeed doing behind her back, and moreover that most of these gossipy girls—especially those in the fourth and fifth grades who hadn’t gotten their own periods yet—were actually jealous of the three of them for what they’d “achieved” at such young ages. Together, inspired by the odd bit of slang Elisa had heard the school nurse use to describe their condition, they decided to declare themselves official founding members of a “Cherry Slush Club” based on these lunchtime meetings of theirs; and to offer a membership to any other girl in their classes who likewise started bleeding.

By the time Elisa reached her seventh birthday a few weeks later, the Cherry Slush Club’s membership had more than doubled, and numerous rival clubs with names like the Red Trailers and the Shark Ladies had sprung up among girls who—for whatever reason—didn’t want to join the original. Every last girl in the fourth and fifth grades was now using some kind of feminine hygiene product to stem her monthly flow, and painfully few girls beneath the age of ten were as yet unstained by the school’s burgeoning crimson tide; so few that a number of them had started a club of their own called the Snow Whites which was, unfortunately, losing members weekly to the newly formed Rose Reds and rapidly running out of potential recruits. Menarche was now striking even among the kindergartners, though it hadn’t touched Clara’s little sister Chloe yet.

With a newly minted “little lady” or two visiting her office nearly every day of the week, the school nurse was being run ragged; though she had spotted the trend early and put in an order for a fresh supply of feminine hygiene products, the order was now two weeks overdue with no guarantee it would ever be filled. Among the girls’ parents and teachers, nerves were fraying and tempers were running short while the principal and his assistant squabbled with the school board and the superintendent over how to deal with the situation. As this very same situation played out in elementary schools across the state and the nation, teachers’ unions began demanding political intervention from various states’ governments and threatening to go on strike if their demands weren’t met.

In Alabama, the governor’s response, with the legislature’s backing, was to order a special two-week-long “elementary school holiday” during which the state’s elementary school teachers, their unions, the school system’s administrators, and the legislature would hold a conference to negotiate a “public health response” to this precocious menstruation crisis. While some parents (mostly in urban areas) approved of this decision, the vast majority grumbled that this reminded them an awful lot of the statewide COVID-19 shutdowns back in 2020, which had also only been supposed to last for two weeks. They did not approve of the disruptions to their work schedules having their children home would cause—just as it had back then—and they sorely lacked what little trust and respect they’d had toward any of the state’s authorities back then, let alone for the ever-loathsome teachers’ unions with their absurd demands and bad-faith negotiating tactics.

The Williams and Williamsons were among these grumbling parents, but for the children of both families, these political implications flew almost entirely over their heads. All Dan and Jack knew was that somehow, their little sisters starting to bleed meant they wouldn’t have to go to school for—at the very least—two whole weeks; which made them ecstatically happy. As for their little sisters, all Clara and Elisa knew was that they wouldn’t be able to meet with any of the other members of their Cherry Slush Club for those two weeks, since the other girls lived too far away to visit when they weren’t at school.


	4. Busted

One day, when Dan was enjoying his time off from school by running a classic computer game marathon over at his friend Jack’s house, Megan took up all of the sheets and blankets from his bed to wash them. As she was doing so, she happened to notice some rather suspicious hardened patches on one particular blanket he had left wedged between the corner of his bed and the corner of his bedroom. A look at some crumbles from these patches under a microscope she’d kept from her college days confirmed his mother’s suspicions: those patches were indeed dried semen, and not only that, but dried semen with significant amounts of sperm in it.

Far from being distraught and hysterical over discovering what naughty things her little boy had been doing (all by himself, she hoped), Megan’s first impulse was to try having a bit of fun at her son’s expense by gushing about how manly and grown up this (supposedly) meant he was now while presenting him with the embarrassing evidence of his boyish indiscretion; such would have been a bit of emotional compensation for the ordeal she’d lately endured dealing with Elisa’s growing pains these past weeks. However, she checked this impulse, deciding instead to go pay a visit to her friend Francis and do some snooping on her son and his friend. What more she discovered there—if anything—would determine how she’d react.

It being a while since they’d last visited with each other, Francis welcomed Megan’s visit almost a little too enthusiastically. There was so much to discuss about what had happened and what was happening: how their daughters’ menarches had been so messy, what they’d thought when they heard about so many other little girls in their children’s school getting their periods early and then realizing this was happening worldwide, and how boneheaded (in their opinion) the political response to this situation had been both locally and internationally. Irritated as she was at being delayed from pursuing her true purpose for being there, Megan could hardly help getting caught up in the discussion with Francis for quite a while.

Then, just as Megan was working up the resolve to excuse herself from the table on the pretext of needing a bathroom break (which was not entirely a pretext, since her friend had been regularly filling a tall glass for her with freshly made iced tea and she’d been freely imbibing it), the conversation suddenly took a remarkably relevant turn. “You know,” Francis was saying, “it seems to me, if the girls are going on the rag so young, why not the boys? I don’t mean going on the rag, of course, but... you know, hair on their chests? Zits on their faces? Wet dreams? Things like that?”

“Well, now that you mention it, how do we know they aren’t?” asked Megan. “Have you checked your boy for any of those things?”

“Well, no, I must admit. Bless his heart, Jack’s a bit cagey about letting anybody see him without his clothes, even in his underwear,” said Francis, “but then, he’s always been like that, ever since he learned how to put them on for himself.”

“Huh. I’d never have known he was so modest.”

“Well, he is. As for zits, I haven’t thought to look for any, but I would notice if he had them; and believe you me, when he does get them, I will notice. It runs in the family: his father was a regular pizza face as a teen.”

“And as for wet dreams...?”

“Like I’d ever ask! He sure wouldn’t tell me, neither, if he did have any.”

“So, do you suppose he’s pure as the driven snow?”

“Don’t know; I doubt it. He helps out with the kidding and the whelping, including the messy parts, so I know he knows where babies come from and he’s not squeamish about handling sticky stuff. On the other hand, he still thinks farts and poop jokes are the funniest things ever, so I don’t think he’s discovered girls yet.”

“No? Well, if he hasn’t, I think he might pretty soon.” Leaning in and lowering her voice, Megan told Francis about what she’d found in Dan’s room.

“For real? You think he’s having wet dreams?”

“If he were, there would be stains on more than just the blanket. No, I think he’s been rubbing them out deliberately. Jim told me once that a preemptive strike—so to speak—keeps a boy from making a mess when he’s asleep and has no control over where his imagination takes him.”

“Weird... my Joe never told me anything like that.”

“Well, for that matter, I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve read articles saying it’s not. What I’m saying is, if Dan’s figured out how to do it, Jack can’t be far behind; that’s if he isn’t already out in front.”

“And what makes you think my—”

“Oh, hey, Mom, I didn’t know you were here,” said Dan as he and Jack suddenly emerged from the hallway into the kitchen. “Jack and me were thinking we’d like to take the ATV back to my place.”

“That’s ‘Jack and I,’ Dan,” Megan corrected him.

“Sorry, Mom. Anyway, Jack and I can take the ATV back to our house, right? This one game we just downloaded won’t install on his computer, so we thought we might have better luck with mine.”

Megan sighed. “Be very careful, Dan. You know I don’t like you riding that thing. Jack, you be sure to take it easy, especially since you’ve got my boy riding with you, got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jack, in as sincere a tone as a little eleven-year-old could muster. He really could be a polite little devil at times, Megan thought, as she reflected on what his mother had just told her about the boy’s tendencies toward modesty.

“And don’t either of you hassle Elisa while you’re there,” she added.

“If she’d stay out of my room, she wouldn’t get hassled,” grumbled Dan.

“You know the rules, Dan.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“So do you, Jack,” added Francis.

“Yes I do, Ma. So long, ma’am,” said Jack, touching his head as if tipping an invisible cap to his friend’s mother. As their mothers watched, the boys strapped on their helmets and took off for Dan’s house as fast as they dared to go when they knew their mothers were watching.

“Do you suppose he’ll figure out you’ve figured him out when he sees his bedding in the wash?” asked Francis as soon as the boys were gone.

“Maybe, but I doubt it. He’s a lot like his father: because he doesn’t pay much attention to the ’girly things’ his sister and I do, he thinks we aren’t paying much attention to the ’guy stuff’ he and his father do either.”

“So he wasn’t too interested in why his little sister came home bleeding either?”

“No. You mean to say Jack wasn’t curious about that?”

“He didn’t seem to be; just said ‘Oh, great, so now Clara comes into heat too.’”

“Did you explain the difference?”

“I tried, but he didn’t seem to hear a word I said.”

“Maybe not, but I’m thinking maybe that’s just what he wanted you to think.”

“You think my boy’s playing dumb with me?”

“How likely is it that he’s not? He taught my boy most of what he knows about sex; I’d be surprised if he had anything left to learn from Dan at this point.”

“Maybe you’re right about that as far as the part about making babies, but there’s one little thing I bet your boy knows better than mine.”

“What’s that?”

“Computers. We got on the net same as everyone else, Joe and me, when computers got to be a thing, but we never did get too good with them. Jack’s a bit better with them, but what he knows, he had to learn all by himself; weren’t much we could teach him. When your boy’s over here and he and Jack get to talking, I can understand them both just fine as long as they aren’t talking computers; but once they’re talking computers? They might as well be talking in tongues for all I can make out.”

“So you don’t know much about computers?”

“Just the basics: turn it on, click on the browser. Joe might know a little more, but mostly he just pays bills and plays games...”

“...and maybe surfs for porn?”

“No, I’m pretty sure not. It’s not like I didn’t think of that, and I know a lot of guys think porn’s not cheating, but my Joe always told me he didn’t see it that way. If he’d been lying about that, something would’ve come up by now: like he would’ve bought me hooker clothes or asked me to do something freaky in bed. So far, he never has.”

“Well, I hope you’re right about that,” said Megan, trying not to let too much skepticism creep into her tone or show on her face. “What about Jack, though? Do you suppose he ever gets curious and goes looking for pictures of girls without their clothes?”

“Well...” Francis lowered her eyes. “...we’ve tried to keep him from finding any if he goes looking. We’ve got some porn-blockers installed on both the old computer and the new.”

“And do you think that’s enough to stop him?”

“I think so... Like I say, he doesn’t know computers the way your boy does.”

“True, but that means if anyone could help him get around your net nannies, it’s my Dan; Jim and I know enough to keep him on a pretty tight leash when he’s on his computer at home, but when he’s over here...”

“You think he could be helping Jack look for dirty pictures?”

“Something like that.” Megan shifted her eyes to the left and right as if looking for an eavesdropper, and then leaned in conspiratorially. “If he has been, would you like to find out?”

Francis shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Well, I don’t know... I mean... I’d hate to think my boy was up to something, but... Is there a way?”

“Possibly.” Megan leaned back in her seat as if to relax, but kept her eyes narrow. “I don’t know as much about computers as Jim, but he did show me some of the ways he keeps an eye on what Dan is doing. Since our boys aren’t here right now, what do you say we have a look at that computer they were using?”

Francis hesitated for a moment, but finally said “I’m game if you are.”

Together, the two concerned mothers went to Jack’s room. The computer was turned off as it was supposed to be: as Francis briefly explained, the consistent policy on which she and Joe had raised all three of their children—for purposes of both energy conservation and safety—was never to leave anything turned on when they weren’t using it. While Megan considered this rule a bit old-fashioned—the computers at her house all being programmed to go into an energy-saving hibernation mode when nobody was using them—it did make sense in context, since Jack’s hand-me-down computer was old enough that such energy-saving features might not work properly on it.

So far, Jack seemed to be a pretty compliant and rule-abiding kid on the whole, if a little sloppy: his room was messy, and he hadn’t put the extra chair he’d brought into his room for Dan back where he’d gotten it yet. Though Francis would usually be annoyed at his laziness, she was glad to let the matter slide for now, since the extra chair made a convenient place to sit while she watched her friend start up Jack’s computer from his chair. To Megan’s satisfaction, the computer took relatively little time booting and bringing its desktop up on the screen; according to Jim, an early sign a computer’s user had been surfing for pornography was its being slow to start due to being loaded with adware and other malware, since a lot of these low-level viruses were in fact STDs transmitted via the user’s having visited some of the internet’s seamier—and typically less secure—sites.

Now Megan proceeded to open each of the browsers available on the desktop to look at their history caches. As she’d rather expected, nobody had used Internet Explorer for anything since years before Joe first bought the computer; and judging by the one entry in its history, its one and only use more than a decade ago had been to download an installer for one of the other superior browsers now installed on it. As for the other browsers, all of them had their settings adjusted so they cleared their history caches automatically when they closed—or so that they automatically started in a private window and therefore never actually gathered any entries in their history caches from the start.

This dearth of information was a bit frustrating, but it also answered a few questions unto itself: judging by what Francis had said about her family’s minimal computer skills, Megan was all but certain Dan was the one who’d cleared the browsers’ histories and adjusted their settings so no new entries would be recorded. While his reasons for doing this might be innocent—he had long been in the habit of doing this on his own computer, even knowing his father could always retrieve similar records about all the websites he’d visited from the daily internet traffic logs the wireless router at their house automatically generated—she had her doubts. The boy surely knew his friend Jack’s family wasn’t tech-savvy enough to be able to monitor his internet activity on this computer so effectively; what might he be hiding?

Remembering what Francis had said about having installed porn blockers, Megan now checked the installed programs section of the computer’s control panel and found that as she’d hoped, Dan had either overlooked or neglected to check for any “parental controls” programs. One was installed, the task manager indicated it was running, and it was keeping regular logs of every site the computer had recently either visited or tried to visit. Accessing these logs required a password, and for this part Francis had to go retrieve her husband’s “little black book” (actually a little brown book bound in faux leather) from a specific hard-to-reach upper shelf in his study, but soon they had the password and were looking through the logs.

While the “blocked sites” log for the past several months the computer had been in Jack’s possession showed nothing of interest (every entry was for a hotlink the program had blocked preemptively, i.e. nullified before anyone could click on it), the log of every site it had not kept the boys from visiting made very interesting reading indeed once it was properly filtered and sorted. While none of the sites Dan and Jack had visited had any blatantly pornographic titles, entries from their visits to search engines showed they had indeed been looking for more than abandonware and classic gaming sites in the past few weeks: search terms and phrases like “how to jerk off” and “how boys masturbate” and “posh wanking” turned up repeatedly. A search for some of these words among other entries in the log also showed that their searches had paid off, and they had subsequently visited some sites dedicated to these subjects.

To the mothers’ simultaneous relief and consternation, nearly all of the visited sites turned out to be articles, with most describing the act of self-pleasuring in rather clinical terms and none actually providing any overly explicit pictures (though a few did have diagrams and one did have a simple drawing). The worst sites to slip through the blocking program’s filters were mostly blog posts containing some rather juvenile humor, colorful metaphors, and highly questionable practical advice on the subject, but Francis and Megan found even these rather tame by their standards. In the end, their greatest concern was simply that they had indeed confirmed both Jack and Dan had seen these sites, as the timestamps on the log entries showed Jack had sometimes been searching at night when he was on his own and other times during the day when Dan was typically present—such as just two hours earlier on this very day.

“We ought to bust them stone cold,” grumbled Francis, after Megan had turned off the computer and they’d returned to the kitchen table. “We ought to bring in our whole families to see the looks on their faces when we tell them how busted they are, just so we can make them beg us not to explain it to their baby sisters!”

“Now, Francis,” Megan chided, “they’re only eleven. Don’t you think they’ll be mortified enough already just knowing that we know?”

“If they’re old enough to get all mannish, I say they’re old enough to take it like a man.”

“Francis, they’re children!”

“Man-children! Old enough to knock a girl up, or at least your boy Dan is. I wonder who he thinks about when he’s beating his baby-maker...”

Megan blushed a furious color, but managed to keep her voice down as she said “Boys will be boys, Francis. I don’t think either of our boys have thought that far ahead yet. They’re curious, that’s all. Weren’t you a little bit curious at that age?”

It was now Francis’ turn to blush. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m being a little too hard on them...”

“You were curious, weren’t you?”

“Well, yeah... a little bit. I wasn’t on the rag yet, and I didn’t know the birds and bees from a hole in the ground, but sometimes when I was alone, I’d look down there and wonder...”

“Wonder what?”

“About a baby; what it would be like, pushing one out. I did know that much from living on the farm.”

“It was the same with me, except I was a suburban girl and the one kitten I had for a pet was spayed when we got her, so I didn’t know anything about giving birth. I just... Sometimes when I was alone, I’d sit in front of a mirror with my skirts up and pull down my underwear and just stare at that fascinating little hole for the longest time. My parents were kinda hipsters, you know, and they thought I ought to be wearing pants just like one of the boys, so they didn’t understand why I wanted to wear dresses all the time back then.”

“Same here, except the only reason I didn’t get to wear dresses more is they were all my Sunday best; couldn’t wear them silky things when doing chores.”

“So, did you ever get caught with your skirts up?”

“Naw. There were some close calls, but I was too quick.”

“So was I; but can’t you imagine how mortified you’d have been if Mommy—or worse, Daddy—had caught you doing that?”

“Yeah, that would have been the worst... but now that I think of it, I guess the boys have it tougher than we do, don’t they? I mean, even if we got naughtier than just looking—”

“I know I did, though that was when I got older.”

“Even if we got naughtier, it never left that much of a mess. The boys, they have to hide what comes out when they do it; speaking of which, I wonder where Jack’s hiding it? He must be better at it than your boy, because I sure haven’t found any spots on his bedding or laundry.”

“He might be using tissues or toilet paper. Did you check his trash can?”

“I did, but there wasn’t anything there.”

“Well, don’t forget to check all the others around the house. If he’s not hiding them there, he might be doing it in the tub and then washing the mess down the drain.”

“You know, now you mention it, he did start taking a bath almost every night a couple weeks ago. I was yelling at him for wasting water and telling him to take showers instead, but he just took a really long shower so it filled up the tub, and then took a bath anyway.”

“That’s probably it, then. Sex while standing up is difficult; I’ll bet that’s also true when you’re doing it all by yourself.”

“And here I thought he was trying to live cleaner for that; the little pervert!”

“I told you, Francis: don’t be so upset. We knew when we had our boys this day would come, just like we knew it would for our little girls, even if we didn’t know it was going to come so soon. Making messes is a part of growing up for boys and girls alike.”

“Well yeah, you got a point, Meg; but I’m still gonna get him for this. If we girls had to suffer some shame for the messes we made growing up, so do our boys.”

“Yes, on that much we agree. What are you planning to do, though? I’ve got the stains on Dan’s blankets to show him. You’ve got only what we found on Jack’s computer; it’s enough to embarrass him a little, but if you tell him about it, he’ll probably just deny as much as he can and then get Dan to help him find and destroy your net nanny.”

“Oh, don’t worry about my boy. I don’t need those fancy computer files to bust his balls. I’ll catch him red-handed, you’ll see!”

“How do you plan to do that?”

Francis smiled. “I have my ways; you just leave that up to me. But would you do me one favor, Meg?”

“Yes?”

“When your boy knows he’s caught, and you’ve got him wriggling like a worm on a hook, ask him who he thinks about when he’s doing it. I think you’ll find out I’m right, and he’s thinking a lot further ahead than you know.”

Megan sighed. “Suit yourself. I think if you ask your boy, you’ll find out I’m right, and he doesn’t really have anyone in mind. Just don’t try to force the issue: if he gives you some girl’s name just because you wouldn’t stop badgering him for one, he’s lying.”

These conditions established, Megan now said her farewells to Francis and went home. As implicitly agreed, each mother waited until evening when the boys’ younger sisters had all been put to bed to spring their traps on their hapless sons. Though Jack and Dan’s embarrassment at being caught was as great as Megan anticipated, these informal interrogations did not proceed quite the way either mother expected.

The one upstairs bathroom Jack and his sisters usually had to take turns using did have a curtain rod perched over its bathtub, but it was old and rickety and precariously perched, and the cheap plastic shower curtain that once had hung from it had long since been discarded and never replaced. Rather than spring for a new curtain (which would probably also have required them to spring for a new rod) after the old one got too decayed and moldy and torn, their parents had simply angled the shower head toward the tiled walls bordering the bathtub’s other three sides so none of the streams spraying from it would overshoot onto the bathroom floor. Since the children almost never took any showers (until recently), neither they nor their parents had ever felt any pressing need to have a curtain there anyway.

To preserve his modesty, Jack therefore typically engaged the lock on the bathroom door when he was in the tub; which occasionally caused some friction between him and the rest of his family when either or both of his little sisters happened to need to use the toilet at the same time. The lock on the door was—quite deliberately, and by design—not incredibly difficult to defeat: it was only intended to keep anyone from barging in unannounced on an occupant who happened to be in something less than a presentable state at the moment. In the event that someone needed immediate access with or without the occupant’s permission (such as when Clara or Chloe really needed to use the toilet), one could unlock it simply by jabbing the hole in the center of the knob with an old sardine tin key (such as the one secretly perched on top of the door frame), a hat pin (such as the ones Francis regularly kept in her purse), or a piece of wire from an unfolded paper clip (such as the ones the family kept nearby in a kitchen drawer).

The one drawback to using any of these “keys” when trying to catch someone by surprise the way Francis intended to do was that springing the lock this way invariably produced a highly audible click, alerting the bathroom’s occupant of the imminent intrusion. This time, therefore, she intended to spring the door itself using a library card from her wallet. Shortly after the girls were in bed, as she’d anticipated, Jack went to take another shower-that-would-turn-into-a-bath just like the ones he’d been having every night for ten nights straight now.

As Francis waited for the sounds of water tumbling into the tub from the shower head to cease, she could hardly help shaking her head a bit at how naive she’d been; why hadn’t Jack’s highly improbable sudden enthusiasm for cleanliness raised any red flags in her mind sooner? Why had her Yankee friend Mrs. Williamson—well-educated, but a bit too flighty and lacking in common sense and not quite down-to-earth enough to be living in the country, in her opinion—proved quicker on the draw at guessing Jack’s ulterior motives than she had been? The more she thought about these embarrassing shortcomings, the more grateful she felt for Meg’s advising her not to bring this matter up in front of the rest of her family just yet; how much might Joe already have known—or suspected—about his son’s naughtiness all along, having once been a naughty little boy himself?

This train of thought was interrupted when Francis suddenly heard Jack cutting off his shower and settling himself into the tub. Listening as he splashed around a bit, she realized in a frightening moment that this was the riskiest, most make-or-break part of her plan: how long was she supposed to wait, or for what should she listen, to catch her son in his most embarrassingly vulnerable condition? Deciding to trust her intuition, she continued listening and waiting as he quieted down, and then—oh, how gloriously, rapturously triumphant the moment—she heard the soft squishing of soapy suds on flesh between his fingers and knew she had him dead to rights.

Slipping her card ever so quickly as she dared between the door and its frame to separate the latch bolt from the strike frame, Francis stealthily and yet very suddenly threw the door wide open and rushed into the room. Jack felt the sudden draft and immediately instinctively tried to cover his swollen turgid member with both hands, but his mother had already seen everything. Moreover, his engorged glans and a small part of his elongated rod were poking out over and above his hands in plain sight, the tiny drops of pre-ejaculate on the tip thoroughly betraying his earlier excitement a fraction of a second before abject dread and embarrassment caused him to go as flaccid and floppy as a party balloon three days after the party.

“Aha! I knew it!” proclaimed Francis. “You’ve been jerking off for weeks—for months, even—you little wanker, haven’t you? Well, haven’t you!?”

“No, I only— I didn’t— This isn’t— Ma, what are you—” Jack’s futile attempts to form a complete sentence ended with him bursting into tears, which quickly turned to anger as his face blushed bright crimson. “Ma, would you please shut the door already!?”

Despite having anticipated most of these responses, Francis was a bit taken aback at their cumulative result. Instead of reciting one of the numerous retorts she’d prepared well in advance to counter almost anything he might say, she found herself closing the door behind her as he had requested—demanded, really. Then came the very awkward silence her planned retorts had been intended to prevent as she stared blankly at Jack and he averted his gaze down to his hands in his lap (now covering his naughty parts far more effectively) in profound embarrassment.

“This was why you took so many baths, wasn’t it?” Francis finally said, her tone much calmer and more conciliatory. “You didn’t think I’d catch on?”

Jack turned his face to the wall. “No,” he grumbled. “I knew you weren’t that stupid.”

Francis briefly considered calling her son out for the insulting insinuations of what he’d just said, but decided not to. “So what were you thinking?”

“I just...” Jack returned to looking down at his hands. “Well, you didn’t say anything, so I figured if you couldn’t prove anything, then the way you saw it, it didn’t happen. See?”

In spite of the seriousness of the situation, Francis couldn’t help suddenly giggling. “Oh, come on, Jack!” she chuckled. “You know that’s not how we do things around here.”

“Yes it is! That’s what everybody does around here! When all the girls at school went into heat, they said ‘It’s nothing,’ and ‘None of your business,’ and ‘Mind on your classwork, boy!’ It was the same thing with you and Clara: ‘No she’s not in heat! Whatever gave you that idea?’”

Francis immediately regained her composure. So now the truth came out; though she had already noticed several rather self-serving revisions in her son’s account of how their discussion of Clara’s condition had gone, she could see how and why Jack had misinterpreted it. “Jack, you got me all wrong,” she said. “That wasn’t what I meant at all.”

For the first time that evening, Jack finally turned and defiantly stared his mother in the eyes. “Then what did you mean?”

“I meant there’s a difference between being on the rag and being in heat. You really didn’t listen to a word I was saying, did you?”

“Well, me and Dan sure didn’t notice any difference!” Jack returned his gaze to his hands more in contemplation now than shame. “We were both like studs at a puppy mill when we were at school, going around with our peckers sticking out all the day long. All the other boys could see it too, and they got to making fun of him and me so much, I was about to bust all their heads if it hadn’t been for Dan.”

“He stopped you?”

“He came up with a better idea. He’d got to reading these books he’d swiped from his pa, see...”

“Dirty books?”

“No, they was clean, I swear! He showed ’em to me. Said they’d been on his pa’s shelf in plain sight forever, he just hadn’t noticed until now. No pictures, just stuff about growing up and getting hair, and how mating is called sex, and that’s how you make babies, and the way boys and girls are different under their clothes, and that sorta thing.”

“And this was the idea he got from them? How to jerk yourselves off?”

“That’s not how they said it, ma! In fact, they didn’t say how to do it at all; they just used this word—‘mass-tar-bay-shun’ I think was how he said it—and he said it was like when a guy is making a baby with a gal, except you’re just pretending, so you don’t need anyone else for it; and sometimes a gal likes to pretend a guy is making a baby with her that way too, so it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Francis shifted her stance uncomfortably. “He didn’t... show you how to do it, did he?”

Jack absent-mindedly shifted his hands to cover himself ever-so-slightly more securely as he gave his mother another defiant look. “Of course not! We didn’t want to look at each other’s dicks; that’s for homos!”

Francis was relieved to hear this, but didn’t want to ease the pressure on her son just yet. “So how did you figure it out, then?”

“Easy: Dan figured it out first, and then he told me.”

“How, Jack? What exactly did he say?”

“Well, it all had to do with what one of his books called a wet dream. It said sometimes when a boy’s asleep, he’ll get sperm on his clothes and his bed because he dreams he’s squirting it into a girl to make a baby with her. So then I says: if a guy can have an accident like that just by dreaming he’s with a girl when he’s asleep, couldn’t he make himself squirt his sperm on purpose while he’s awake just by pretending he’s having a dream like that? That way, he can control where the sperm goes, and it’s easier to clean up the mess when he’s done.”

“Yeah, I can see how that would work...” Francis suppressed a smirk, remembering how she had come to very much the same realization after having a sexy dream of her own when she was thirteen; that was when she had stopped merely looking at her baby hole and started flicking and prodding and poking at it with her fingers while thinking about the boy from her dream. She was a bit nettled to hear from Jack that he’d figured this out from his friend’s books rather than thinking of it on his own, and still wanted to humiliate him a little more; so she asked, though she already suspected otherwise from what Meg had told her, “Has he been jerking off in the tub too? Is that where you learned how to do this?”

Jack blushed anew at his mother’s insinuation. “I don’t think so. I mean, maybe he does, but I didn’t get the idea from him. I just thought—you know—this was the one time you’d expect me to be naked, and the sperm has a place to go... Please, Ma, don’t tell Dan’s mother on him for this! He was just trying to help— Ma? What’s so funny?”

Francis couldn’t help giggling at the look on her son’s face as he pleaded on behalf of his friend. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry so much about them, Jack. She’s the one who told me on you both! She found some stains on one of Dan’s blankets while she was washing it, and it wasn’t that hard to put two and two together from that; you and he always did talk pretty freely, after all.”

Jack turned and fixed his eyes on a particular tile on the bathroom wall as if his very life depended on it. Francis didn’t have to see his face to know hard he was struggling to keep from crying as he said “Ma, please...” in a very husky voice.

“Oh, now don’t take it so hard, Jack. We’re not either of us mad at you for this. ‘Boys will be boys,’ as Meg—that’s Mrs. Williamson to you—says. I just wanted to hear you say it for yourself.”

There was a long pause as Jack coughed, trying to clear his throat without sounding too much like he was clearing his throat, and then he said “Well, I just said it. Are you happy now!?”

“Almost. There’s just one thing more I want to know...”

“What’s that?”

“When you’re pretending to make a baby with a girl, as you like to say, who is she?”

“Huh?”

“You heard me. Who is she? Who’s the girl of your wet dreams?” Francis hoped her son couldn’t hear the treachery in the tone of her questions.

He didn’t, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter anyway. After clearing his throat a few more times, Jack blurted out “I don’t know! I just—” He cleared his throat again. “When the girls at school all went into— When they were all going on the rag, I could smell the blood. I couldn’t stop smelling them, I couldn’t stop thinking about them, every time I went to school: all the girls in my classes, every one of their bodies getting ready to have a baby if anybody would give them one. Like I said, Dan and me, studs at a puppy mill.”

“Yeah, you said that, but isn’t there—”

“I was trying not to notice. For several weeks, I could forget for a while I was home, but then there was that day they told me about you taking Clara home early. When I got home that day, the smell of blood was here too, so I tried going over to Dan’s house every day.”

“But doesn’t anybody—”

“Then his baby sister Elisa started bleeding, and the smell was there too. It got so there was no escape: even when you took me with you to the grocery store last week, I could smell the girls there were all on the rag. I’d swear with my hand up even the little toddler girl some lady in the checkout line ahead of us had in her buggy was bleeding into her diaper under her skirts!”

During this soliloquy, Francis had already begun to suspect Jack’s perception of so much menstrual blood in the air was all in his head, but his claim about the toddler girl now made her certain his overly active imagination had gotten the better of him. Nonetheless, now that he had stopped talking and she could get a word in edgewise, she wasn’t going to waste the opportunity questioning the accuracy of his perceptions. Instead, she asked “But Jack, you’re not answering my question: which one of those girls do you think about? When you’re pretending to make a baby in a girl, whose face do you see in your mind?”

“I said I don’t know, and I mean it!” Jack insisted. “It’s never just one girl’s face. It’s all of them and none of them at once. Then it’s over and the girls don’t matter and their being around doesn’t bother me anymore for a while. That’s how me and Dan stopped being made fun of in school—back when we was in school, I mean.”

“And what about now that you’re out of school? Neither of you boys’ baby sisters is on the rag right now.”

“Well yeah, but all those girls, they’re still out there. I gotta do something to keep from thinking about ’em too much.”

“Oh, really? Well, isn’t that—”

There came a sudden knock on the door, and Clara’s soft but quite audible voice saying “Mama? Is that you? I need to go potty.”

Francis sighed softly to herself as she briefly thought of reciting a few nasty words, but had to suppress the impulse in the presence of her children. She called out “Honey, your big brother’s in here right now. Use the one in my room, would ya?”

After a moment, Clara said “Okay, Mama.” Then her mother and brother heard the gentle padding of her receding footsteps as she headed down the hall to her mother’s room as instructed.

Francis turned back to her son. “Finish your bath for now,” she said, “and whatever else you think you need to do, but from now on, you don’t need to take one every night. Pumping all this water uses a lot of electricity, and our power bill’s high enough as it is. Tissues are cheaper, and we got whole boxes of ’em in the bathroom downstairs, got it?”

“Yes, Ma,” said Jack, in what he hoped was a suitably chastened tone.

“Another thing: now that you’re getting to be a big boy, I think you could do with a lock on the door to your room to keep your baby sisters from walking in on you when you’re busy, don’t you?”

“Yes, Ma,” said Jack again, this time trying not to sound too improperly enthusiastic.

“Now, finish up and get some sleep. You and your buddy Dan and his mother and I are going to have a lot to discuss tomorrow, understand?”

“Yes, Ma,” Jack repeated, this time just trying to sound meekly obedient.

“Good night, Jack.”

“Good night, Ma.”

Then Francis left, making sure to lock the door again and pull it firmly shut behind her on her way out. On the way to her bedroom, she shook her head partially in whimsical amusement, partially in disappointment. Her friend Meg had been right about Jack after all: who would have thought a boy who’d just discovered his attraction to girls could have desires so powerful and yet so unfocused?

In the Williamson residence, at roughly the same time Francis was catching Jack in the act in his bathtub, Megan was walking into Dan’s bedroom with his dried-semen-stained blanket in her hand and a rather smug smirk on her face. Now that she had seen the computer evidence, she had decided to go with her original plan for having a little fun at her son’s expense. All of his bedding had now been properly washed and dried and returned to his bed; all but the one piece in her hand.

“Well, well, well!” said Megan, trying hard to keep from chuckling. “First Elisa gets into her monthlies, and now my son’s making sperm; looks like my little Danny boy is all grown up!” Up to now, she hadn’t called him “Danny boy” since that time in second grade he’d flown into a rage over how his classmates who’d heard her calling him that had laughed and poked fun at him. Now she had determined not to spare him from any kind of embarrassment, including that one.

“Mom!” Dan groaned indignantly. “I told you never to— Don’t call me— What are you talking about!?” he stammered, as his mind took a few moments to catch up to his situation.

Megan could sense the desperation in the tone of his last complaint, and approached him on his bed with all the grace and subtlety of a shark tasting blood in the water and moving in for a kill. “Did you think I wouldn’t know what these stiff patches on your blanket were?” she asked. “Your father used to keep an old rag in his bedroom for every time he rubbed one out too.”

“Ugh!” Dan groaned again. “Just why would I need to know that? Seriously, Mom, why did you have to tell me that!?” His eyes darted around the room as his mother sat down at the end of his bed and stared him directly in the face.

“You know, I’m rather disappointed you got caught so easily,” she continued. “Even your friend Jack—” She stopped very suddenly, remembering she probably shouldn’t say too much about him, lest Dan start wondering where she’d discovered his friend’s indiscretions as well. She had already said too much, however.

“What about my friend Jack!?” Dan snapped, suddenly defiant.

Megan decided she was just going to have to improvise. “Your friend’s mom Francis and I talked it over,” she said, “and we both agreed Jack’s been spending far too much time in the tub just to be cleaning himself. She’s probably taking him to task for it right now.” Speaking of Jack and his mother, it suddenly occurred to her just how Francis might be managing to trap her son into confessing; not that this inspiration had much relevance to the matter at hand, but she was definitely going to have to ask her about that later.

“The tub?” Dan muttered. Megan could see a certain realization dawning in his eyes, and guess with a fair amount of certainty what this inspiration was, though she said nothing about it. “Well, he never told me anything about that.”

Sensing something of an effort to change the subject, Megan carefully steered everything back to the matter at hand. “Anyway, after I found your sperm on this blanket, it wasn’t too much of a leap of logic to figure out where he learned to rub it out, considering what you’ve been doing for probably several months now.”

“Weeks, Mom.”

“What was that?”

“I only started a few weeks ago.”

Megan smirked a little more; of course, this was the very confession she’d been trying to elicit from her son with her exaggerated estimate. Judging by the timestamps in Jack’s computer’s net nanny’s logs and the number of stains on the blanket, by “a few weeks” Dan meant about four or five. “So where did you get the idea to start playing with yourself like that?” she asked. Since her estimate would place the commencement of this activity several weeks before the elementary school’s shutdown, she could imagine several possible sources; but she was rather surprised at his answer.

“It was those books about sex,” he said. “Jack and me—”

“‘Jack and I.’”

“Jack and I, we had this problem. When all the girls in our class got their periods, it was like they all got weird, started giving us this look...”

“What kinda look?”

“I don’t— It was... kinda like... It was like now that they could have babies, they wanted to make some... with us. I think I heard somebody call it flirting.”

“Ah, so they were giving you _that_ kinda look.”

“You know what I mean?”

“Of course.” Megan’s smirk changed a bit into a genuinely wistful smile; she could recall having given a few boys “the eye” (as she preferred to call that flirtatious look) herself when she was a teenager. She didn’t feel like articulating what she knew about it to her son at the moment, however. “Well, go on: why was that a problem?” She already had a fairly good idea why, but she wanted to hear it in his words.

“Well, we were always getting these erections, as the books say. ‘Boners’ is what Jack was always calling them. It’s like... It’s not like we were thinking about making any babies with them—or at least I wasn’t; I don’t know about Jack—but our bodies wanted it, and it showed, and the other boys kept making fun of us for that...”

Megan tilted her head and smiled knowingly. “So you came up with a solution.”

“I told him about those books I got from Dad, so he asked to see them, and we looked to see if they said anything about this kinda thing. They didn’t say much about this in specific, but one of them had something about ‘wet dreams’ in it; said they’re kinda this ‘safety valve’ for guys who want to have sex but can’t. At night, they dream they’re doing it, and it feels almost as good as actually doing it, but they end up squirting the semen on themselves instead of in a girl. It said the mess was the only real problem with this, but it was easy enough to clean up.” Dan blushed a little at the memory, casting his eyes downward.

“So then...” Megan prompted.

“Well, then Jack says to me, what if you don’t have to be asleep and dreaming? What if you just use your imagination? Just think what it would be like if you had your penis in a girl’s vagina, and do what that would do using your fingers.” Dan’s face blushed a little more.

“And did you figure out what it’s called when you do that?”

“Yeah... The book talked about a thing called ‘masturbation’ where you rub yourself up to make yourself feel good, and said boys and girls can both do it, though it didn’t say much more than that. So I told Jack that’s what he must be talking about, and if we did that, it would make our bodies stop wanting to make babies with those girls.” Megan had never seen Dan’s face get so crimson with embarrassment. “And it worked: we stopped getting boners around the girls, and the other boys stopped making fun of us.”

Something about her son’s story didn’t quite add up, but it took Megan a moment to intuit what it was. “So masturbating helped you and Jack get along with the other boys again?”

Dan quite visibly cringed at her frank use of the clinical term. “Like I said, they stopped making fun of us.”

“I mean, you and they are friends again?”

Now Dan was looking distinctly uncomfortable in a subtly different way as he refused to make eye contact. “Well... no. It’s not like they were ever really our friends... not mine, anyway; I think maybe Jack is friends with some of them. Really, I just wanted them to shut up about it, and they did.”

He was holding something back, Megan could tell, but she also knew if she pressed him too hard, he would shut her out. She decided to change tactics; in a somewhat more friendly and conciliatory tone, she asked “Were you and Jack the only ones getting these—as your friend Jack put it—‘boners’ around the girls? They didn’t hassle anyone else?”

Megan could see this shift in her approach working: her son’s shoulders, which had been stiffening with tension at her previous questions, began to relax a bit. “Well, now that you ask, I think they were picking on a few others. Rodney for one, I’m pretty sure. He’s always kinda been the school nerd, and they’ve always picked on him, but I think I heard him yelling ‘I’m nothing like those pricks!’ at them; and I’m not sure, but I think he was talking about me and Jack.”

“You mean ‘Jack and me.’” Megan had to suppress a smirk to make it work, but choosing this odd moment to correct her son’s grammar did help relax him a little further.

“Yeah, Jack and me.”

“Did you or Jack ever ask him about that?”

“Well, no. He sure wasn’t helping us, and anyway, I never really liked him and Jack didn’t either.”

“So you didn’t tell him how you and Jack got them to stop making fun of you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Did you tell anyone else? Did any of those boys think to ask?”

“No.” Dan was looking a bit irritated now, Megan thought, as if he might be getting tired of this line of questioning. At least the tension from his embarrassment seemed to have faded, though his guard was definitely still up. “Mom, why are you asking me all this weird stuff? What are you driving at?” he asked, almost as if he were deliberately confirming her assessment the moment she’d made it.

“Well, I was just thinking...” Megan smiled warmly as an inspiration for how to break the tension further occurred to her. “...you really think those other boys weren’t getting turned on by the girls the way you and Jack were?”

Dan tilted his head quizzically. “‘Turned on’ by them?”

“You know, erections; their bodies wanting to make babies with them, like yours?”

Megan’s smile got even broader as she saw realization dawning in his eyes. “I’d never thought of it that way,” he said. “I bet they were, too, those hypocrites! They were just better at hiding it somehow.”

“Were they? How do you suppose they did that?” Now Megan could stop suppressing her smirking as she waited for her son to make the obvious inference.

It took an uncomfortably long time for Dan to reach the punchline, but when his face lit up, she knew letting him figure it out for himself had unquestionably been worth the wait. “They were probably— Those jerks! I could kill them!” he groaned. “I bet they’ve all been playing with themselves at night, just like—” Suddenly remembering he was talking to his mother, he blushed again and decided not to finish the sentence. He didn’t have to; Megan knew perfectly well what he had been about to say.

“Yes, just like you and Jack. You boys are in good—or, well, sizable—company in your late night naughtiness, though I couldn’t say whether those other boys have figured out as much about it as you yet.” Actually, in view of how limited Dan’s grasp of the theory, application, and vernacular was, Megan suspected those other boys had already figured out significantly more; but she saw no reason to share these private musings with him. “Be honest, though: when you finally figured out how to keep from getting a hard-on every time you were around the girls, did any of those boys ask you what your secret was? And would you have told them if they had?”

Dan quietly shook his head.

“And would you want me to tell them for you?”

Dan’s eyes suddenly widened in alarm. “Please don’t, Mom!”

Megan laughed. “I’m just kidding, Dan! Nobody outside these four walls needs to know about your little secret if they don’t know already.” Judging by the look on her son’s face, he was not finding this reassurance very reassuring. “Dan, all boys and girls have to find out about this part of the facts of life sooner or later; and when they do, they almost always think they’re the only ones to know these embarrassing secrets, so they’d better keep them to themselves. It’s as if you think we grownups never went through any of this when we were your age.”

His shame rediscovered, Dan turned his head away as he petulantly grumbled “Well, you sure never told me any of this stuff before when you talked about how things were when you were my age.”

“Yes, well... to be honest, that’s because we mostly weren’t doing anything like this back when we were eleven. We’re not really kidding when we talk about how fast you kids grow up these days, you know.”

“Well then, you didn’t really go through any of this when you were my age, did you?”

“Getting hot and bothered around the boys? No, I guess not; and I sure wasn’t your little sister Elisa’s age when I got my first period.”

“So what would you know about all this, then?”

“I learned it when I was thirteen, that’s all; and so did your father.” Even without seeing her son’s face—which was turned to the wall—Megan could tell he was a bit skeptical, so she continued “If it makes you feel any better, your father was already reading those books about sex right around the same age as you; though as he told me, finding out how to do it wasn’t the same thing as actually wanting to do it.”

Dan turned his face back toward his mother, though he still kept his eyes down. “I told you, it wasn’t me, just my body that wanted it.”

“Oh, I know what you mean: it’s not like my body and mind always agreed on what they wanted either. Of course, with us girls, it’s usually the mind running ahead of the body; with you boys, it’s mostly the other way around.”

“Oh? And what would you know about boys?”

“I married one, remember? And I gave birth to one; I’d say that counts for something.”

“Yeah, but you’ll never be one.” Megan thought she heard a note of triumph in her son’s voice, as if he’d scored a point in a debate; and she didn’t particularly like this new tone.

She shrugged. “Well, I suppose you do have a point there. I haven’t told your father how you’ve been using this blanket yet, but I’m sure he understands these things about being a boy far better than I ever could. Maybe I should go get him...?” Megan shifted her weight on his bed as if she were about to stand up.

Dan’s tone immediately turned panicky. “No, wait! Don’t bring Dad into this!”

Her bluff having achieved the desired effect, Megan immediately settled back into place. “Still prefer to keep your embarrassing secrets from most of the other guys in your life, eh?” she said.

“Of course I do!”

“Then you’ll just have to take Mommy’s word for it: just because I’m not a boy doesn’t mean I don’t know lots about them. I’ve been studying what makes boys tick since I was thirteen; could have earned a degree in boys if that were an official school subject.”

“All right already, Mom! I’m sorry!”

“Sorry for what? Be specific.”

Dan turned his face to the wall again. “I’m sorry for giving you attitude like that. I just...”

“You’re not too comfy talking about guy stuff with your mom. I know.”

“I don’t even talk about it with Jack much, and he doesn’t like to talk about it either. He says only fags would want to do that.”

“Watch your mouth, Dan! You know that’s the _other_ F-word we don’t use in this family.”

“Sorry, Mom. He’s the one who actually said it, though.”

“I know. So you both masturbate, but not around each other?”

“Well, of course not around each other! That would be f— uh, it would be, you know, that word Jack uses that we don’t.”

“Right.”

“Besides, it’s hard to think about what it’s like making a baby when another guy’s around. I mean, a guy can’t make a baby with another guy. That would be crazy.”

“Yes, I suppose it would.” How right he was, Megan thought, though her son was still far too young to know anything about all the scientific research and resources so many who were old enough to know better had wasted attempting to prove this bit of common sense wrong. Anyway, she was relieved her son’s sexual interests remained focused on reproduction, and were therefore wholly heterosexual so far. “So, tell me if I’ve got this right: you’ve been imagining having sex with girls at night here at home so your bodies wouldn’t be craving it with the actual girls at your school during the day?”

“Yeah, that’s about right.” Dan was no longer facing the wall, though he still kept his eyes down as he answered.

Megan gave him her sternest look and used her sternest tone. “But now you’ve been out of school for more than a week. Have you still been... imagining having sex these past several nights?”

Never daring to look up, Dan silently nodded his head.

Now assured of her son’s honesty, Megan eased back into a more conciliatory tone. “So why is that, might I ask?”

Now thoroughly ashamed of himself, Dan muttered something indistinct.

“What was that? Speak up, Dan.”

“I said it’s really fun, Mom.”

“Yes, I’m sure it is.” When Dan said nothing more for a while, Megan added “Do you still think of those girls at school though they’re not around?”

“Well... sometimes; but it’s more than just that.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You won’t be mad at me?”

Megan actually reached over and put a hand on her son’s shoulder. “Dan, I’m not going to ground you or take away your allowance or anything for this. I just want to know the truth.”

She could feel Dan cringing from her touch, but he told her what she wanted to know. “Uh, well, y’see... When I’m... imagining, like, the moment my baby-making stuff starts squirting out... I see these sparkles in my eyes, and there’s this buzzing in my ears—it’s like the noise those cicadas were making in the trees this Summer—and I just feel really, really good all over. I think it might be kinda like what it’s like to be high on drugs... I mean, before all that bad stuff they warned me about in health class starts happening, you know?”

“Yes, I know.” Actually, nothing she’d done by herself had ever felt quite that good to Megan; but some of her earliest experiences with actual sex certainly had. She was always trying to recapture those magical feelings with her husband Jim these days, though only occasionally and with a lot of foreplay did she ever succeed.

“And... it’s like... well, the high does wear off, but none of that bad stuff like with drugs ever happens. Mostly, everything’s fine and I just want to clean up and go to sleep. Then the next day, everything’s still fine; I’ll see a girl giving me that look, and I know my body still wants to make a baby with her, but... no boner, you know? Everything’s fine.”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” said Megan, although in truth, her experience had been almost the exact opposite: stroking herself to orgasm while fantasizing about boys had only made her desire them more when she saw them in school the next day. To keep her desires in check, she’d had to turn to fantasizing about boys more distant and unobtainable, such as celebrities in boy bands and on movie screens... and—of course—that one half-cousin of hers she only saw at family reunions who’d looked like he ought to be in a boy band even though he’d never learned how to play any instruments and couldn’t carry a tune to save his life. “Sounds to me like you are getting addicted to it, though.”

“Well... yeah,” Dan admitted. “It’s just... I’m not shaking or sweating or anything, but just thinking of a girl makes me go stiff even when she’s not around; and not doing it makes me think about girls all the time. I couldn’t afford to be like that around the other boys in school.”

Thinking back over the past few weeks, Megan now realized why her son had been rather uncharacteristically sullen and moody on several recent weekends, holing himself up in his room and only coming out for meals instead of spending his free time visiting with Jack. Thinking of Jack, she then remembered a certain promise she’d made to his mother earlier that day. “So when you tried not to think about doing it with a girl, you were thinking about doing it even more. That sounds like addiction to me, all right. Tell me something, Dan, when you’re... imagining sex with a girl, is it any girl in particular? Do you just think of any pretty face you’ve seen recently, or is there some girl who’s special to you?”

“Well...” Dan pondered his answer carefully. “Up to a couple weeks ago, I wouldn’t have said there was anybody like that. Just... whoever I thought looked the prettiest that day.”

Megan could tell her son was holding something back from her. A mixture of experience and intuition suggested it had something to do with how a given day’s “prettiest” girl earned that designation in his eyes; but her intuition also suggested she shouldn’t let this minor detail distract her from her main question. “But now?”

“Now we’ve been out of school a while, Jack and I don’t see those girls anymore. I don’t know who Jack’s thinking about these days but... Mom, you promise not to tell him anything I said here tonight, right?”

“I promise: nothing goes outside these four walls.”

“Well, you gotta understand, for the last week... and then some... we’ve not seen any girls at all but our sisters—or at least, I haven’t; Jack said he saw some when his mom took him out shopping a few days ago—”

He was stalling, and Megan was certain that could only mean he was afraid what he was about to tell her was something dreadful. “Surely you’re not thinking about Elisa?” she ventured, and then immediately felt like clapping her hand over her mouth when her son raised his head and she saw the shocked expression on his face. Accusing him of incestuous thoughts? What had she been thinking!?

“Mom, are you crazy!? Elisa’s my ugly little sister; _of course_ I wouldn’t think of doing anything like that with her!”

A mixture of relief and renewed concern flooded over Megan. Although she could hardly agree her daughter Elisa was “ugly” by any stretch of her own imagination, growing up together with his little sister had clearly immunized Dan from having any sexual desires for her; a natural safeguard against inbreeding she’d read in one of her psychology textbooks at college long ago was known as the Westermarck effect. With Elisa disqualified, however... “Then who, Dan?” she asked, though she already suspected—and feared—she knew the answer.

“Who do you think, Mom? Clara.” Now it was Dan’s turn to want to clap his hand over his mouth, and he actually did it as he cringed and shrank away preemptively from the shock and horror he expected to see on his mother’s face.

Much to her son’s surprise—and in no small part to her own—Megan was not so shocked at this revelation as either he or she would have expected. Instead, he beheld a strange mixture of dull sadness and tranquil surprise, almost as if she were disappointed with him. “She’s only eight, Dan,” she said.

“And I’m only eleven; and she’s already bleeding, so she can have a baby; and when I’m over there with Jack, I swear sometimes, the way she looks at me—” The words all came spilling out like the wild excuses they were, and then Dan clamped his hand over his mouth again, and then he loosened his grip to say “Please don’t tell Jack, Mom. You promised.”

Megan’s nose twitched the way it sometimes did when she was about to cry or laugh, and then Dan heard the faint snuffling she made when trying—and failing—to suppress a laugh. One tear welled up and spilled out of one eye, and then she smiled as she continued to giggle almost uncontrollably. “I should have seen this coming. I did see it coming—a mile away!” she said. “Of course I won’t tell Jack. I won’t tell Clara either. After all, they’re your problem!” As another tear rolled down her cheek from her other eye, she giggled harder.

Dan had never seen his mother react to anything this way before, and seeing her doing so now was seriously unsettling. “Mom, what are you talking about? What’s so funny?”

Megan just shook her head and continued to shake with quiet laughter as she balled her hand into a fist and wiped each eye with it. When she finally gained her composure, Dan thought the calm smile on her face as she fixed her eyes on him like a hawk was somehow even more disturbing. “A promise is a promise, Dan,” she said. “Everything you’ve said here tonight stays here, and that goes for everything I’ve said too, got it?”

Dan tilted his head ever so slightly, but said “Got it.”

“Is that a promise?”

Dan held one hand over his heart and his other hand up for a moment like a Boy Scout taking an oath, though he’d never actually been a member of that or any other such organization. “On my honor.”

“Good. Now, as also promised, I’m not going to punish you for this in any way. In fact, I won’t even tell you not to go on fantasizing about making a baby in a girl, even if it’s Clara. You hardly need me to tell you to keep all this to yourself, of course.”

“Of course.” For the first time in quite a while, Dan was able to meet his mother’s gaze with his own as he said this.

“I would appreciate it if you didn’t use this blanket to clean yourself anymore once you’re done, however; it’s going to take some hard laundering to clean your sperm out of it. I won’t say anything if I find a bunch of Kleenex wadded up in your trash can or if our toilet paper gets used up a little faster than usual around here, understood?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Another thing: I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s your _sperm_ on this blanket, not just your semen. I put some of it under the microscope. It doesn’t look much like those drawings in your father’s books—sperm cells kinda explode when they dry out—but there can be no doubt: you’re making actual baby batter every time you’re pretending to make a baby in Clara, or anyone else.”

“For real?”

“For real. Speaking of Clara, as you yourself said, that she’s done some bleeding means she can indeed have a baby. I don’t know whether she’s ever really looked at you the way you say you’ve seen her doing, but if so, I should point out it’s not because she actually wants to make a baby with you; like you, it’s her body that wants the baby, and that’s what’s making her curious about boys like you. If you actually told her what you’ve been thinking of doing to her, she’d be just as grossed out as you were when I told you how we made you.”

“Ugh,” Dan groaned. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell her anything, believe me.”

“You say that now, but children have always been grossed out when they first learn how babies are made, and somehow it seems they always change their minds later. Just remember, she makes eggs now, and you make sperm; so if you ever actually were to do to Clara what you’ve only been imagining doing so far, you really could make a baby in her. Then you’d have a far bigger mess on your hands than any you’ve ever gotten on yourself when rubbing one out, do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal, Mom.”

“Good. Now, one last thing: as I said, your friend Jack’s mother has almost certainly been discussing a lot of these same things with him too. Come tomorrow, you and he will undoubtedly have a lot to discuss with each other as well. Just remember your promise: if you want to tell him anything you’ve learned tonight, feel free; but if he ever asks you whether I’m the one who told you any of those things, you don’t have to lie outright, but just tell him you’d rather not talk about that. Got it?”

“Yeah, Mom, I got it.” Dan’s shame had faded, and he was actually starting to sound a little annoyed.

“Good.” Megan stood up and gave Dan a little peck on his forehead. “Now, whatever you were thinking to do tonight, finish up and then get to sleep. You’ve got a pretty big day ahead of you tomorrow, I’d say.” On her way out the door, she suddenly stopped and turned around once more. “Oh, and Dan? I know how we told you not to keep your door locked all the time—and you still shouldn’t—but whenever you’re doing something you really wouldn’t want me or your dad or your little sister to catch you doing? I don’t mind if you lock it then. Just don’t leave it locked when you’re done.”

Dan tilted his head again slightly, as if he weren’t quite sure he’d heard her correctly. “I won’t,” he promised, and then he added “Uh, thank you, Mom.”

“You’re welcome.” Stepping out, Megan closed the door behind her. As soon as she was out of her son’s sight, she leaned against the wall next to his door and sank exhausted to the floor. This interrogation—which was what it had been, however affably she might have conducted it—had taken its toll on the interrogator as much as the subject.

After Megan saw the light streaming through the crack beneath Dan’s bedroom door go out, she waited for the click the lock would make when he turned it, but she never heard it; and when her son actually started snoring lightly, she knew she wasn’t going to. She carefully turned the handle just enough to confirm he hadn’t somehow manage to lock it silently, and then crept away to drop the blanket off in the laundry room and then join her husband in bed. Exhausted as she was, her thoughts took an awfully long time to settle down enough for her to get to sleep.

In a way, Megan reflected, her friend had been right after all: Dan had already narrowed down his sexual desires to the point where he was fantasizing about one specific girl. Imagining how outraged Francis might be were she to learn his fantasy girl was none other than her own just-recently-turned-eight-year-old daughter Clara, she decided this was the kind of secret that couldn’t hurt her so long as she didn’t know it. Only after she’d pondered—and mostly rejected—numerous ways to be honest about it without being too specific did sleep finally overtake her.

The next day was a very big day indeed, and for a great many more people than just the boys and their mothers. As he was sitting down to breakfast with his family, Jim showed Megan a news video with an accompanying article on WBRC (Alabama’s local Fox News affiliate) reporting an ominous new development: Alabama’s governor and legislature having refused to accede to a thoroughly ridiculous list of demands the teachers’ unions had taken this opportunity to make, the unions were ordering an illegal statewide strike not only in the elementary schools, but in all schools. According to him, this was the only mainstream media source even pretending to offer any neutrality on the subject at hand; all the others were giving their full vocal support to the teachers’ unions, spending most of their airtime on thinly veiled editorials castigating any and all parents, teachers, lawyers, and politicians who dared point out how illegal and unethical this kind of “negotiation” was.

Unfortunately for everyone hoping to get the students back to school, the teachers’ unions had garnered a lot of support from the usual grievance groups and other meddlesome busybodies by using racially and sexually inflammatory rhetoric to present every last one of their demands as some kind of heroic “civil rights” cause and all opposition to them as systemically racist and sexist and various-kinds-of-“phobic” oppression. Though a solid majority of Alabama’s voters supported the government’s “public health response” ordering all schools to reopen on schedule at the end of the “elementary school holiday” with no changes whatsoever to their operation, the school system’s various administrators and other bureaucrats and no small number of its teachers were bitterly opposed, and were determined to go on strike in defiance of the law. Though the police also overwhelmingly supported the government’s reopening mandate and the governor certainly wouldn’t hesitate to call out the National Guard as needed, these enforcers would also be facing considerable legal opposition from a substantial number of municipalities’ courts and district attorneys and mayors.

To make matters worse, the teachers’ unions had already sent out the call to the numerous hate groups that were their national political allies, and those groups were already promising to bus angry mobs of lawless thugs into the state to join the illegal strikers in their “mostly peaceful protests” on the picket line. No one knew for certain whether they were bluffing—those thugs tended to be cowards when faced with armed police vigorously enforcing the law—but a number of people were enrolling in local militias or forming their own just in case. In short, a potentially violent showdown was rapidly approaching, and not very many believed the schools would be able to open as planned on Monday when the “holiday” ended.

Though she had never been very comfortable with having guns in her house, Megan was now quite grateful that Joe and Francis had convinced her husband to get a few rifles for deer hunting and a handgun and concealed carry permit for personal defense. While Jim normally kept these locked away in a special case in his “man cave” in the basement, he was carrying the pistol in a holster under his coat today (“to get used to it,” he said) while he was working. Other than that, there wasn’t much the family could do but wait and see whether being in a relatively remote rural location would allow the school to reopen on schedule without any troublemakers picketing it.

In the meantime, Megan and Francis had quite a few things to discuss, as did Dan and Jack. As soon as Jack turned up on his ATV to pay his friend a visit, Elisa started wanting to go visit Clara and Chloe over at their house, which was more excuse than her mother needed to get in the car and go pay her friend a visit. Joe was just pulling out of his driveway as they pulled in, and Francis was in the kitchen with her daughters when Megan and her daughter arrived at their door.

Seeing Megan had brought Elisa with her, Francis cheerfully told Clara and Chloe to take their friend with them to their room and play quietly “while I chew the rag with Mrs. Williamson here.” As soon as all three girls were out of the kitchen, their mothers sat down at the table and leaned in so they could hear each other speaking softly.

“You were right,” they both said simultaneously, and then stared at each other in surprise. Neither of them could ever remember a time they’d ever seen anything like this happen outside a movie. Knowing they both probably had the same question, Megan decided to raise an eyebrow and let Francis ask it first.

“What do you mean I was right?” Francis asked as expected, and then explained “Jack told me he was just getting horny from having so many girls bleeding around him, so he had to get some relief. Couldn’t pick one out from another to save his soul when he was like that. Guess he weren’t so far ahead in his planning as I thought.”

“Well, you were right about Dan,” Megan replied. Feigning a bit of misty-eyed instant they-grow-up-so-fast nostalgia, she explained “Eleven years old, and my little boy’s already got his first crush.”

“Oh, really?” Francis raised her own eyebrow. “Anybody I should know about?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t think so, no,” Megan immediately replied, as she’d rehearsed. After all, why _would_ she think her friend should know about Dan’s “crush”—such a fine euphemism for the focusing of what both women knew to be the boy’s most actively sexual fantasies—on little Clara? How could her friend possibly benefit from having such a potentially scandalous secret revealed to her?

Francis intuitively noticed the rapidity and shift in tone in Megan’s reply and immediately suspected she was being slippery with her language: why _wouldn’t_ her friend think she ought to know who the boy was thinking of plowing while he was punching his munchkin if the girl—or boy, though he sure didn’t seem the type for that—didn’t happen to be anybody important? Still, rather than start a fuss almost from the very start, she thought it better to defuse the situation and probe her friend at the same time by saying “Well, I guess Jack weren’t lying when he said your boy ain’t into that homo stuff neither.”

As expected, Megan looked and sounded relieved to be telling an obvious truth. “That’s not quite the word he used according to Dan, but no, he isn’t.”

“Oh? What word did he use?”

Also as expected, Megan seemed to stiffen a bit when asked to say a naughty word, just as she had when asked whether her son’s “crush” was anyone important. “Well...” she leaned in and whispered the otherwise forbidden word her son had repeated to her last night. “Back up in Minnesota, that was the _other_ f-bomb even before everybody got so ‘triggered’ and ‘woke’ and so forth; a boy could get his teeth punched down his neck for calling another boy that.”

“That might could happen down here too if he called the wrong boy a fag,” said Francis, smirking as her friend cringed at how casually she used the word, “but if he minds his manners, I wouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you. We don’t cotton too much to the sodomites and their fake words in this homestead.”

Megan continued to shift uncomfortably in her seat. “Still, I raised him not to use words like that in my house, so could you please tell Jack not to teach him how to curse?”

“I can try; don’t know how much he’ll listen, but I’ll let him know that’s cussing at your place and you don’t like that.”

“That’s all I ask.” Megan replied, relaxing quite visibly once she said this, though Francis noticed she still had her guard up; she was definitely hiding something.

“So anyway, as I was saying, Jack’s girl-crazy these days, if not about any particular girl like your boy,” Francis said, and almost the moment she said this, she saw Meg stiffening again. What _was_ it about her son’s “crush” that she should be getting her back up like that? From long years of experience, she knew simply asking Meg this question (or one like it) straight up would not help, so she decided to ease back and circle around the subject a little instead. “He said it was all about how they were on the rag, that he was smelling it everywhere.”

“Really? He can smell blood?” Once again, Francis could see how swiftly Megan relaxed the moment the subject changed.

“Well, yeah... sorta. He does have the nose for it, with all the kidding and whelping we do here, but I think some of it’s just in his head.” Francis proceeded to give a more detailed account of the things her son had told her than maybe she should have, including what he’d said about his ordeal at the grocery store. Interesting as this all was to her friend, she couldn’t help noticing how Meg leaned in a bit more when she talked about Jack’s complaints of smelling blood on his sister Clara and then his friend’s sister Elisa. Her intuition went to work as she finished her tale. “So if you ask me, I think my boy’s been letting his little head do too much of the thinking for the big head, if you know what I’m saying. I mean, an itty bitty baby girl bleeding into her diaper? How likely is that?”

“Not too likely,” Megan agreed, “but tell me something: do you think he would really be getting turned on by the smell of his own little sister’s blood?”

“Maybe; but I’m telling you, most of that is just because Jack’s mind’s playing tricks on him. As I say, he smelled blood even where there weren’t none.”

“So you’re not worried about his being around Clara even when she is bleeding?”

“Why would I be? It’s not like he’s really into his... own... sister...” Megan heard Francis slowing down her speech and saw a realization dawning in her eyes, but this breakthrough in her friend’s thinking was not quite what she thought: in fact, Mrs. Williams had already understood full well her friend’s insinuation about Jack having incestuous desires for Clara, and had already rejected it out of hand as absurd. What had actually just occurred to her was a highly probable answer to the question of which girl Mrs. Williamson’s boy Dan was fantasizing about knocking up when he was spanking his monkey, and why she didn’t want to say it. “Meg, no matter what you may have heard up in Minnesota, we don’t have a whole lot more incest or inbreeding down here in Alabama than anywhere else.”

“Maybe not, but you did marry your own first cousin.”

“True, but Joe and I were the first couple in my family in three generations to do that. We ain’t met another couple of kissing cousins in all the time we’ve lived here, neither, which is all our lives. Just ’cause you can marry them here doesn’t mean people seem to wanna very much.”

“Yet your state’s got a reputation. It got to where I had to start threatening to block people on Facebook to stop them from belting out ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ in the comments every time I mentioned you in a post,” said Megan, rolling her eyes a bit at the memory.

Francis rolled her eyes too. “See, that’s why you shouldn’t be messing with all that social media crap. Meg, we here in Alabama ain’t a batch of benighted backward Europeans like them Swedes who let half-brothers marry half-sisters, or them Frenchies and Spaniards who’d let you plow your own brother or sister as long as you didn’t try to marry ’em!”

Now her friend was mentioning these things, Megan did remember having read several of these creepy little factoids about Europe’s sexual laws in a magazine or on a website somewhere; but this background confirmation of what Francis was saying only raised a slightly different kind of question in her mind: “You know,” she teased, “for all the things my Facebook acquaintances say about you for being a colloquial family, you do seem awfully well-versed in the sexual habits of foreign countries.”

Francis smirked. “That’s because of all the trash-talking them fags and dykes were giving us about privatizing marriage back in 2019. We trash-talked ’em right back about how their own pushers of that ‘marriage equality’ crap were already trying to legalize incest and push that on us, saying it’s legal in Europe, so why not here; it was all right there on their own websites, you see. Then the bill got signed into law, marriage went private, and pretty much nothing happened; but Joe and me never did forget, ’cause it sure comes in handy when somebody’s dunking on us for being marrying cousins.”

Megan winced, half in jest and half in seriousness. “Ouch.”

“But as I say, Meg, just because smelling blood—or thinking he smells it—makes him horny doesn’t mean there could ever really be anything between Jack and Clara. They’ve known each other just about all their lives, and they can hardly stand each other.”

Francis could almost swear she heard a soft snapping noise as her friend suddenly stared her in the face; during their conversation’s detour into comparing Alabama’s sexual practices and laws to those of other places, Megan had momentarily forgotten the main subject to which they were now returning. It took an uncomfortably long pause before she finally thought to say “So, uh... you’re not worried about them.” It was as much an acknowledgment as a question.

Francis sprang her trap. “Of course not. Would you be worried your boy Dan might have a thing for his baby sister Elisa?”

The trap failed to snag Megan, however: had Dan in fact been having incestuous fantasies about his baby sister, Francis would have expected her face to be absolutely stricken with horror; instead, she just narrowed her eyes a bit in disgust and said “Well, when you put it that way, I guess not. Actually, I did think to ask him about that, but he told me she was ugly.”

If Meg was lying, she had to be a better liar than any Francis had ever met; and from how long she’d known her friend, she just couldn’t bring herself to believe that. “Well, there you go,” Francis concluded, “although I sure can’t agree about Elisa being ugly. He just thinks that about her because she’s his baby sister.” Disappointed as her intuition was at having its most promising explanation taken out of the running, it was already working hard on finding alternatives.

At the same time, Megan’s intuition was also hard at work, and what it was telling her at this moment was that all her efforts to deflect and distract her friend from the truth were failing badly: even though Francis was seemingly on another subject now, she had already circled back before and would surely do so again sooner or later, forcing her either to confess or lie outright. The latter she could not bring herself to do, even if she weren’t already completely unable to think of a convincing lie. Her only option was to take control of how exactly the truth was to be revealed through a preemptive strike, and for this her intuition had fortunately just provided an inspiration on what to say: “Speaking of Elisa, didn’t you say something about Jack smelling her blood too?”

Francis raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, but if he smells any now, that’s gotta be all in his head for sure, doesn’t it? She hasn’t been on the rag for a while, I don’t think.” Why was Meg bringing this up just now?

“No, and if her monthlies are going to be anything like mine were, it’ll probably take a while before they actually are _monthly_. I still remember how, after I got my first one, it took six weeks before I had another.”

“Yeah, it was like that for me too, except my second was three weeks later. Because my ma told me they came once a month and it happened to be still the same month on the calendar, I thought something was wrong with me!” Meg was obviously trying to steer their conversation away from her boy again, but Francis was willing to play along for the time being, since she still hadn’t gotten any inspirations as to the boy’s fantasy girl yet.

“Of course, if it’s all in his head anyway as you say, Jack probably still thinks he smells her there anyway.”

So Meg was back to talking about Jack again; where was she going with this? “Actually, probably not,” Francis said, “but from what he told me, he’s probably getting a bit horny from remembering it.”

So subtly that even she herself didn’t realize what she was doing, Megan moved her face in a bit closer to her friend’s. “So you think he gets turned on just by the memory of my little seven-year-old girl doing some bleeding, eh?” Her tone wasn’t particularly accusing, but the accusation was unmistakably there in her words all the same.

That was her game, then: zero in on something potentially scandalous about Jack in order to distract from whatever was scandalous about Dan. Well, that wasn’t going to work. “Maybe.” Francis shrugged. “Our boys are eleven. You think they know any girls older than twelve at that school of theirs? Of course, they haven’t seen any of those girls for more than a week now; just their little... baby... sisters.” She smirked as she lingered over those last few words, for just as she was saying them, a sudden inspiration had brought an explanation for everything together in her head. “’Old enough to bleed is old enough to breed,’ as Joe likes to say. What a boy first wants is what he sees every day, Meg; or what he smells in my boy’s case. Wouldn’t you say so?”

As subtly and unconsciously as she’d gotten in her friend’s face, Megan now shrank back a little from it. Confession time was here, though she wanted to be absolutely certain her friend knew what she thought she knew before confirming it. Plucking up her courage, she looked her right in the eye as she said “Yes, I would, Francis. So, any girl your boy first wants because that’s who he sees—and smells—every day, that’s fine with you?”

Francis didn’t stop smirking. “As long as my boy Jack weren’t choking his chicken to that itty bitty toddler girl, I reckon so.”

“So, even if he were thinking of my little seven-year-old Elisa?”

Francis held her eyes and her smirk steady. “Yeah, I think I could live with that.”

“Well, how about that...?” Megan put her hand on her chin in a pensive pose. “Well, that’s good, I suppose, because you may just have to pretty soon.” Now it was her turn to smirk a little as she realized revealing the truth to her friend was probably going to be a lot easier than she’d expected.

Francis finally stopped smirking and narrowed her eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Megan followed suit. “Francis, when I said you were right about my son, that didn’t mean I was entirely wrong. When I asked Dan if he ever thought of any specific girl when he was... imagining what it was like to make a baby with one, he told me if I’d asked him a few weeks ago, his answer would have been different. Like your son Jack does—I’m guessing—he’d just think of the prettiest girl he’d seen that day and imagine doing it with her; but then school was out, and he stopped seeing all those pretty girls... all but one.”

Francis raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Her tone as she asked the question sounded almost resigned to hearing the answer, Megan thought; a good sign.

“Yes, the only pretty girl he saw much anymore was Clara when he happened to be over here visiting with Jack; and as your husband might say, if she’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to breed.”

Francis drew a deep breath and took her time letting it out. There it was, she thought: the truth at last, and the way Meg had broken it to her left her little choice but to accept it as given and without complaint. “Yeah, that he might,” she said, “and that she is. My little baby girl...” Unlike Megan, she didn’t have to feign being misty-eyed. “I never would have thought she was going to get her first blood so young.”

Megan did feel a bit of sympathy, but she was not in a sentimental mood. “And I never would have dreamed my Elisa would be getting hers when she was almost seven,” she said, “but here we are; and just like Clara, she’s old enough to breed because she’s old enough to bleed, and the only girl her big brother’s best friend ever sees outside his own family these days. If any girl could get Jack to focus only on her, she’s the one.”

“Mercy me, you’re right!” said Francis, her eyes widening. “In fact, he already could be; what if he was lying to me when he said he doesn’t think of any one girl?”

“No, don’t sell yourself short, Francis,” Megan insisted. “If he’d been lying, you’d know it already: he’s your son! You’ve been raising him all his life, and you know him better than almost anyone else. I’m just saying, what was true when he said it probably won’t be true much longer. It wasn’t so long ago my own sweet, innocent little Danny boy thought sex was gross and couldn’t understand why anybody would want to do a thing like that, but that was then, and this is now.”

“Well, honest or not, I sure ain’t gonna let my boy sneak it past me this time if he gets a hankering for your little girl, Meg. I promise my eye will be on him at all times whenever she’s around if you’ll do the same with your boy and my little girl.”

“Of course I will, Francis. What are boys’ mothers for, if not that?” Megan smiled quite sincerely for the first time since they’d sat down, and her friend smiled back.

Then Francis got an idea. “For the time being, until Dan and Jack can get back to school and the other girls there, I think maybe we might ought to be arranging things like now: boys in the one house and girls in the other. What do you say?”

“That’s not a bad plan, but we may have to keep it up for a good long time,” said Megan. Then she proceeded to talk at some length about what she’d seen on her husband’s news feed that morning. “Those pesky protesters!” she concluded. “Jim and I were trying to get away from this kinda thing when we got down here from Minnesota, but I guess we should’ve known the rioting parasites who ruined the Twin Cities weren’t going to leave anywhere else alone for long.”

“Oh, don’t you worry; teachers out here don’t cotton to their kind. School will be open on Monday,” said Francis. So their conversation now turned to politics, local and national.

While Dan’s mother and sister were out visiting with their friends, he and his friend Jack were pretty much hiding away from the rest of the world in his room, sitting next to each other on his bed where they usually sat when they were playing video games, gloomily commiserating about their similar situations. He’d realized the moment his friend turned up at the door with that gloomy expression on his face so closely mirroring his own that the jig was up for them both, just as his mom had told him last night. Now, as they relived the previous night’s humiliations, they could hardly stand to look at anything but the floor.

“We are so busted,” Jack had said the moment the door was closed.

“Yeah, we blew it,” said Dan. “I’m sorry, man. Mom made me tell her everything.”

“Everything?” Jack would have been more shocked, but at this low point of his life, he didn’t feel like he could possibly feel any worse.

“Well, okay, so not quite everything; she never asked about your computer.”

“Great,” Jack said in his most sardonic tone of voice. “So she doesn’t know about all that online stuff. What a load off my mind.”

“She didn’t have to. Mom found my blanket.”

“Told ya that was a bad idea.”

“Oh, like yours was so much better! I told you she’d catch on sooner or later.”

“Well, if Ma hadn’t beaten that lock, she could catch on all she liked, but she could never have proved anything. All the proof went down the drain.”

“She picked the lock?”

“Nah, I would’ve heard the rattle if she did something like that. She just... pulled the door open somehow; didn’t even have to turn the knob.”

“Must be just like my bedroom door here: even when you’ve locked it, you have to pull up on the handle a little with both hands until you hear the click, or anyone can just pull it open.”

“I ain’t never had to jiggle my bathroom door that way. When I locked it shut before, so help me, it _stayed_ shut!”

“So anyway, she saw the stuff on your chest?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I didn’t finish. She caught me all swollen up, and my dick sticking out a mile and a half past my hands. Talk about a buzzkill...”

“So she _didn’t_ really have any proof, then? You just fessed up anyway?”

“What are you, my lawyer!? This ain’t a court case! You ever tried to look your mama in the eye when she’s got you dead to rights, tell her you didn’t do what she just caught you doing?”

“Sorry, man.”

“Well you ought to be! It’s your fault, you know; Ma told me your ma found out about you from that blanket, and that got them wondering about me too.”

“I told you, she would’ve gotten suspicious sooner or later anyway. No guy ever takes that many baths when he’s just trying to stay clean.”

“I still say it’s your fault. She wasn’t suspicious yet.”

“And I still say what’s it matter? She was going to find out anyway, and now she has; just like my mom.”

“Yeah, we’re screwed.”

For a while, the two boys had nothing more to say, so they just sat there in glum silence. Then Dan thought to say “Did your mom... ground you, or anything like that?”

“Uh... No, actually. Did yours?”

“No. That was kinda the weird part, you know? Didn’t even tell me to stop doing it; just to stop using the blanket.”

“You don’t say... My ma just said to stop taking so many baths, that tissue’s cheaper, and she’d get me a lock on my door to keep my baby sisters out.”

“So she’s gonna let you go on doing it too?”

“Yeah, man, I couldn’t hardly believe my ears. I know, sounds like the stuff guys say on TV just ’cause it sounds cool, but I mean it: had to check to make sure they didn’t have water in ’em!” Actually, it had been his mind he’d had to check to determine whether it was working right, rather than his ears; but Jack didn’t feel any need to clarify this detail to his friend.

Dan perked up considerably. “What do you know? Maybe we’re not so screwed after all!” he said. “Our moms are cool with it as long as we keep it to ourselves, which is exactly what we were going to do anyway.”

Jack perked up too for a moment, but then got a bit gloomy again. “Yeah, but they’re over at my place talking about us right now, just like Ma said they’d be.”

Dan wasn’t going to let Jack get him down. “Yeah, I suppose so, but look at it this way: they both took it the same way, right?”

“Yeah...”

“And it turns out they kinda knew already even before that, right?”

“Well, yeah, but...”

“So what’ll they have to say to each other?”

“I’m thinking something like ‘Yeah, my boy’s been jerking off just like you thought.’”

“But they knew that already, right?”

“Well, yeah...”

“So what difference does it make? Now that they know, there’s nothing more for them to know, and they aren’t going to tell anyone else.” Actually, Dan thought, Jack’s mom would most likely be very interested in knowing how her son’s best friend had his best friend’s little sister—her own fertile little daughter Clara—specifically on his mind whenever his fantasies about what it was like to make a baby paid off in several ecstatic spurts of that sticky gelatinous semen stuff that—so his mom had said—really could make a baby in her; but then, Mom had promised not to tell her or anyone else about that, hadn’t she? So that secret was not for his friend’s mom to know, and he therefore wasn’t actually lying when he said there was nothing more for her to know, was he?

“They still don’t know about the stuff on the computer.”

“No, and as long as you don’t tell and I don’t tell, they never will, will they?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“And as I said, even if they did, what difference would it make? We were done anyway; we’d already found out what we wanted to know.”

“Yeah... you know something?”

“What?”

“What that one piece we read said about semen going milky when you’re making sperm? Mine’s doing that now. I’m making sperm!”

“So you’re making baby batter now? Cool! So am I!”

“You are? And you’re calling it ‘baby batter’ now? I kinda like the sound of that... Did you think of calling it that yourself, or...?”

“Uh...” Dan remembered his promise to his mom; maybe she wouldn’t mind too much if he told how he’d gotten the idea from her, but why take the chance? “Well, I think lots of people call it that, probably,” he said. It took a moment for him to convince himself of the truth of what he was saying; but it was true, wasn’t it? After all, how likely was it that his mother had been the first to think of saying that, rather than hearing it from somebody else? “Kinda like how we all used to think we’d invented ‘Kill The Guy Who’s Got The Ball’ first.”

Jack knew exactly what he meant, of course. “Heh. Yeah, I guess you’re right. So anyway, you’re making baby batter too? And Clara and Elisa are making eggs too. Do you know what this means?”

Why had Jack had to bring up that subject—of all things—at a time like this? Dan could think of nothing else to say but the truth, though he turned away as he said it. “Yeah: we could actually make babies, if we wanted to... with our sisters.”

“Exactly; but not with my baby sister Clara, of course,” said Jack, cheerfully oblivious to his friend’s discomfort. “She’s a rotten little brat.”

Now Dan was the one having trouble believing his ears. “For real? Not with her?”

“Of course not!” Jack turned and gave his friend an odd look. “Well, of course, I mean... I know it’s _possible_ to make one with her, but who’d _want_ to? Not me, that’s for sure.”

Having confirmed he had indeed heard what he thought he’d heard, Dan was now easily able to mask his discomfort with amusement instead as he turned back to his friend and said “Yeah, I suppose it’d be the same for you with Elisa. It would be _possible_ to make a baby with her... if you put a bag over that ugly mug of hers first and think of somebody else while you do it.”

Jack’s eyes flew wide open as he tilted his head to one side. “Are you yanking on my leg, Dan?”

Dan flipped his palms up and shrugged. “Obviously not. I mean, come on, you know how hideous my kid sister is; you’ve seen her when she’s poking that little piggy nose of hers in where she’s not wanted lots of times.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this! Dan, are you blind? I mean, she can be annoying and all for sure—I’ll give you that—and she obviously ain’t got much body on her to speak of; but your baby sister is a mighty cute gal! If she was up for it and it weren’t no trouble for her to have one, I’d make a baby with her any time.”

“No way!”

“Yes way.”

“You gotta be kidding me!”

“Cross my heart, hope to die,” Jack insisted, with the appropriate accompanying gestures.

“You really do mean that, don’t you? You’re _that way_ with my ugly little sister?”

“That’s what I been trying to tell ya, Dan.”

Dan looked Jack straight in the eye. “So... when you’re stroking yourself, you’re seriously thinking about putting a baby in her?”

Jack didn’t even flinch. “Sometimes.”

“You must be crazy.”

“Yeah? What about you, then? I’m not the one who can’t see what a cute little gal he’s got living right here in his own house with him! Who’re you seeing when you’re working yourself up to it?”

Dan’s discomfort at contemplating what he had once thought his most scandalous secret had evaporated along with his reasons for keeping it. He almost felt a little proud of himself as he boldly proclaimed “Well, if you’re not crazy for thinking about putting your baby-maker in Elisa, I must not be crazy either for wanting to put mine in Clara.”

“Clara!? Now I know you’re yanking me!”

“No, I’m not. She can be a bit of a brat—I’m not saying she’s not—but when she gets that naughty look on her face, I think she’s really sweet.”

“Ugh! Cut it out, man! You’re giving me the willies!”

“I’m serious. Your kid sister’s just as pretty as mine is ugly; prettier, even.”

“Well, that explains a lot: no wonder you can’t see my baby sister’s as disgusting as yours is cute!”

“You know, I think I finally get what Dad meant when he said ‘There’s no accounting for taste.’”

“For sure. Pa always told me ‘Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder,’ and now it’s all coming together as to why.”

“If you don’t like Clara, your loss is my gain.”

“You got that the wrong way around; if Clara’s got you looking right past Elisa, the less for you, the more for me.”

“Perfect.”

“Fine.”

The two friends sat glaring defiantly at each other for a long moment, and then suddenly the tension broke and they both laughed. “We must both be crazy,” said Dan. “If your sister or mine ever found out what we’ve been doing while thinking about them, they’d be totally grossed out.”

“Yeah, that’s why Ma’s getting me a lock on my door.”

“I mean, besides that; like how they’d freak if Clara found out about me, or Elisa found out about you.”

“Well, I won’t tell Clara on you if you don’t tell Elisa on me.”

“That’s a promise. Shake on it?” Dan extended his hand.

“Deal.” Jack held out his own, and they shook on their agreement.

After that, there was an oddly awkward moment of silence, which Dan finally broke by commenting “Gotta say, though, I don’t think I ever saw you looking at Elisa that way.”

“That’s ’cause I wasn’t,” said Jack. “She’s a cute gal, but there’s plenty of cute gals in our school too; and some of them are looking ‘that way’ back at me, know what I’m saying?”

“Or, well, they were before they closed the school a couple weeks ago,” Dan grumbled. “Those girls always looked your way more than mine anyway. I don’t know; even when school was still open, I never could seem to keep my mind on more than one girl at a time. Now that it’s closed, the only one I think about is Clara, because she’s the only one I see. Maybe I just need to get out more.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Jack agreed, “but then again, it might not help either.” He proceeded to tell Dan his version of the story about his experience with the girls at the grocery store. “Ma says being on the rag’s not like being in heat, and I wish I could believe her, but it sure don’t feel that different for me. Maybe if I could be more like you, just stick to one at a time, I’d be better off.”

“Oh, believe me, it’s not much better being stuck on one; especially when you know how her mom would freak if she knew what you’re thinking of doing to her little girl. Maybe I need to be more like you, like thinking of some other girls for a change.”

“Couldn’t hurt to try that either, I reckon, but why should you worry about my ma? She’s mighty understanding about me—more than I ever gave her credit for—so I think she’d be pretty understanding about you too.”

“Maybe, but maybe not. If my mom knew how you’ve been thinking of plunging your baby-maker into her innocent little girl—as she thinks of her—while stroking yourself, you can bet she’d freak out. Your mom might be more understanding of you, but that’s because it’s not _her_ sweet innocent little girl you’ve got in mind. Since that’s exactly who’s on my mind, I don’t think she’d be so understanding in my case.”

“Well, yeah: if you do more than just _think_ about doing it with my baby sister, Ma would for sure blow a gasket; and if you actually was to get Clara knocked up with your baby? She’d skin you alive; but that don’t mean she’s gonna come after you just for what you _think_ , man. She ain’t the type.”

“I hope you’re right about that, but I sure wouldn’t trust my mom that much not to come after you just for thinking about Elisa that way. You gotta promise you won’t tell your mom any of this, or your pop either, since he’d probably turn right around and tell her anyway.”

“Huh... Yeah, now that you mention him, maybe Pa wouldn’t be so understanding as Ma. Well, I’ll swear to that with my hand up if you’ll promise the same about your ma and pa.”

Dan put his hand up. “Done. I solemnly swear I will not tell my mother or father anything about what you might be thinking of doing to Elisa.”

Jack followed suit. “And I solemn swear with my hand up to say nothing, nada, zip, and zilch to Mama and Papa alike about your hankerings for Clara.”

“Cross my heart, and hope to die.”

“Stick a dull knife in my eye.”

The promise made, Dan and Jack briefly clasped their raised hands together with each other to seal the deal the way they’d seen some characters doing in a movie on the TV at Jack’s house (which they weren’t supposed to be watching, but Jack’s parents had both happened to be out elsewhere at the time). The gravity of their promise hung heavy on the two friends for a minute or two as they stared at each other’s grim faces, and then they chuckled again and their somber mood was gone. After all they’d suffered, they had finally come to accept the reality that life after embarrassment existed in practice and not just in theory.

Firing up an old NES multi-cart on his Retron 3, Dan recommended to Jack that they try to win the old _River City Ransom_ game on it. This being an old-fashioned “beat ’em up” brawler game (one of their favorite kinds), the two proceeded to hammer the buttons on their controllers (and thereby to wallop the game’s enemy gang members) with considerable enthusiasm until late in the day when it was time for Jack to go home. Their minds caught up in boisterous chatter and laughter and on-the-fly strategizing as they played (and won) the game, the two boys could easily forget for a while the ordeals they’d recently suffered, and how the strange new desires they were feeling were daily continuing to complicate their lives.


	5. Separation

On Monday, as threatened, numerous teachers statewide went on strike. As Francis had predicted to Megan, the majority of the teachers at their children’s elementary school refused to join the illegal strikers on their picket lines; but much to her surprise and disgust, a large enough minority did that the school was insufficiently staffed to be opened for in-person classes. Instead, therefore, the school’s principal now ordered its streaming video-conferencing technology from the bad old days of COVID-19 dusted off and brought out of retirement and put back into service for virtual classes.

Since the school’s failure to reopen had caught a great many other parents by surprise just as it had Francis, the “classes” that Monday mostly consisted of parents and teachers contacting each other through a patchwork of older and newer communications technology to get the video-conferencing system back up and running and the class schedules arranged to accommodate their various situations. As for the students, they mostly just had to show up in front of the camera for the teachers to mark them “present” on their attendance rolls, and then got to spend the rest of the day goofing off much as they had for the previous two weeks. Legislators, meanwhile, were thundering against the teachers’ unions’ illegal strike as they worked on passing numerous bills enacting sanctions against all its participants.

Elated as they still were at not having to go to school, Dan and Jack were truly beginning to miss seeing their classmates, especially the girls. In his attempts to fantasize about somebody other than Clara, Dan was having trouble remembering what any of those other girls even looked like, resulting in his focus inevitably returning to his best friend’s little sister. As for Jack, now that he knew his best friend wouldn’t stand in his way, little Elisa was looming ever larger in his fantasies while his memories of—and interest in—other girls was fading fast.

Though their virtual classes on Tuesday reintroduced them to their classmates to a degree, neither the Williams nor the Williamson children were particularly thrilled. Dan and Jack didn’t find any of their female classmates’ faces quite so attractive on camera as in person, while Clara and Elisa were miffed at not being allowed to hold their lunchtime Cherry Slush Club meetings and meet online with each other or any other girls who weren’t in the same grade; neither did Chloe particularly enjoy not being allowed to play with her kindergarten classmates and eat lunch together with her fellow Snow Whites. For all the improvements made to the technology since its first widespread usage in 2020, online meetings were still a poor substitute for in-person social gatherings.

With a little assistance from their mothers and the loan of five fully equipped laptops from the school, Dan and Jack soon started visiting with each other in person every day both during and after school hours (which was no problem for their teachers since they were in the same grade and attended a lot of the same classes), while Francis and Megan always took their daughters with them immediately after school ended to visit with each other at whichever house didn’t happen to be hosting their sons at the time. Though the boys did gradually come to notice the pattern and realize what their mothers were doing, they didn’t mind too much since it meant they got to spend a lot of time together out from under their parents’ supervision. Besides, they rather preferred to continue fantasizing about each other’s sisters from a safe distance for now.

Meanwhile, though the legislature continued to rain down sanctions on the illegal strikers and the organizations backing them, the illegal strike and the increasingly angry protesting on the picket lines continued unabated for week after week while the insolent teachers’ unions added a further demand to their long list of unreasonable “negotiation points” that every sanction against the illegal strikers be rescinded and they be restored to their teaching positions with full back pay for the time they’d spent striking. Needless to say, Alabama’s legislature was having none of this, and the governor was getting ready to declare an emergency and call in the National Guard soon if the protests turned violent. While more than a few of the hate groups allied with the teachers’ unions were ready to order their thugs augmenting the illegal strikers’ picket lines to start rioting, however, the unions’ leadership had so far managed to persuade them to restrain themselves for the time being; so the state and the illegal strikers remained perched in an indefinite stalemate, each side waiting for the other to make its move.

About six weeks after her first period, Clara’s second finally arrived. A few days later, so did Elisa’s. Dan noticed Jack tended to get a bit mopey whenever either of the girls was in the house with them and then be more agreeable after her mother took her away to the other house. He wasn’t the only one getting moody: the usually playfully tomboyish Clara was rather irritable and snappish toward everyone who crossed her path, while Elisa had recently shut herself up in her room and refused to come out for any reason, crying and sulking and saying something hurt down below and she felt sick and wasn’t hungry for her lunch. Recognizing these behaviors from her own experiences as the symptoms of menstrual cramps, Megan gave her daughter some pain medication to take the edge off of them, and then asked Jack to take Dan back to his own house on his ATV and ask his mother Francis to come visit her today.

“She gets it from her mother,” Megan explained, as she handed Francis another mug of hot chocolate. “I had some terrible cramps when I was a teenager; they did a real number on my academic performance and social life, you just can bet.”

Francis shrugged and took a sip. “That probably explains Clara too,” she said. “I could get awful catty sometimes when I was on the rag. What she’s doing now? Practically nothing compared to some of the fits of temper I had back then, I reckon.”

“Menstrual cramps at her age... It’s too painful even to think about it! When you’re seven, a year feels like practically forever; and if she’s like I was, she probably won’t stop suffering from those cramps until she’s well into her twenties.”

“You’re telling me! When I was at my worst and Ma was at her wit’s end, she sometimes said to me—she’d say—‘I hope you have a kid _just like you_!’ and mercy me, did that curse ever hit its target! I knew the day she was born Clara was gonna be a fiery hellcat when she hit her teens, but I never expected she’d flare up five years early. Only consolation is, maybe all this ain’t gonna last so many years as you’re thinking.”

“You don’t think so? Why not?”

“You been keeping up with the rest of the world, lately?” Francis pulled a clipping from a local newspaper out of her purse and showed it to Megan. “Menopause Striking Women In Late 20s” blared the headline. “Worldwide Crisis Brings ‘Last Chance’ Baby Boom” declared a sub-header. “You ever get the feeling this is all connected somehow? Right after we’re suddenly out of our childbearing years way ahead of our time, our baby girls are just as suddenly into theirs way ahead of their time? If it was just us, I’d chalk it up to bad luck, but this is everyone and it’s everywhere: in every country on every continent, grade-school girls are going on the rag while grad-school girls are going off it.”

“Well, yes... I know that. I’ve been seeing articles on some of Jim’s favorite news sites about it, though I don’t usually read much past the headlines these days. It was kinda comforting at first to know our miseries had so much company, but now it’s just kinda depressing... As I was saying, though, how does this make you think our girls’ menstrual woes aren’t going to last?”

“My Clara’s in the second grade, Meg. Your Elisa’s in the first. Chloe’s still a Snow White for now, but some of her kindergarten classmates are already Rose Reds. You and me are in our thirties; these women in the article are in their twenties. A few stories of sweet young things in college going dry before they graduate are already popping up. How much lower can the ages at either end go? Toddlers bleeding while the teens dry up? Babies bleeding before they’re born and tweens losing their fertility before they can legally lose their maidenhead?”

“Ugh... Perish the thought! Did you really have to go there, Francis?”

“Why shouldn’t I? What I’m saying is, the ages on both ends are plunging like a stone somebody dropped into the ocean, and it hasn’t taken a whole year for the common age for gals to retire from the pudding club to drop by more than a decade. If this keeps up into next year, our baby girls might not even make it into their tweens before they can’t have babies anymore. Then we all might be wishing they could have their cramps and their crabbiness back.”

“I get it, Francis, I get it! Unthinkable is not the same as impossible... but if the nightmare you’re describing actually comes true, what are we supposed to do about it anyway? You said it yourself: you and I aren’t going to have any more children unless we get lucky blowing our lives’ savings on long shots at fertility clinics; and if our children can’t have any grandchildren for us? That’s it: we’re washed up. Finished. Kaput. And by ‘we’ I might mean everybody, as in the whole human race.”

Francis grimaced as if a huge boulder were passing through her digestive tract. “For somebody who doesn’t want me to ‘go there’ so much, Meg, you sure ‘went there’ a lot more than I ever did,” she said. “You’re right, of course. If our babies can’t give us any grand-babies, our family lines end with them; and if nobody’s babies have any grand-babies, it’s end of the line for all families. We can’t let that happen.”

One side of Megan’s mouth turned up in a sardonic smile. “So when you say we can’t let that happen, did you mean ‘we’ as in all humanity the way I did, or just you and I?”

“You and I, Meg. When it comes to having babies, we only get to decide that kinda thing for our own families.”

Megan examined her friend’s face very carefully to see if any twitching muscle would betray a strained effort to keep a straight face, but nothing was moving. “You can’t be serious,” she said, after a long moment’s awkward silence. “You and I saving the whole human race? We’re just two little people, Francis, in a big wide world with maybe eight billion other people in it.”

“Two families of little people, you mean,” Francis retorted, “and yeah, maybe we can’t save all those other billions. Ain’t we still part of the human race? Even if none of those others have any more babies, won’t the race live on through us?”

“But how? You said it yourself: our daughters may lose their fertility before they’re old enough to lose their virginity.”

“Before they’re legally old enough to lose it, I said. Legal ain’t the say-all and be-all of what’s possible. My Clara and your Elisa sure ain’t legally old enough to be making babies, but that don’t mean they can’t.”

The color drained from Megan’s face. “Can you possibly be saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Meg, if the laws don’t follow reality, then reality sure isn’t going to follow the laws. The government’s laws say our baby girls can’t give us grand-babies, but reality says they can. If the law says our baby girls aren’t allowed to have babies while they still can to keep our family lines from being snuffed out, then the law is wrong.”

“But they’re too young! Childbearing is a huge responsibility; one too important to be left to those too young to appreciate all the consequences.”

“True; but them ‘too young’ kids who ain’t ready been having kids of their own for ages anyway. My baby sister, she got her first bun in the oven when she was fifteen; took to fooling around with one of them bad boy seniors with a reputation, though I warned her about him.”

“Well, yes, something like that happened to one of my cousins up in Minnesota too; but that’s different: those were teenagers! Everybody knows kids that age make mistakes sometimes when they let their raging hormones get the better of them. Our little girls aren’t even in their tweens yet!”

“Yet they’re having those raging hormones already. You knew the risks the day your baby girl was born, Meg: that she might grow up to be a wild child to break her folks’ poor hearts with her gallivanting around the school with every boy who takes her eye and getting herself knocked up from it like my sister. If I’m guessing right, that last part probably ain’t gonna happen now; but tell me: what if it did? What would you do if your baby girl made that mistake?”

“To be honest, when she was born, I was thinking I wouldn’t have to worry about any of that until she got to be at least thirteen or so.”

“So fine: say she was fifteen by the time it happened, like my sister. What then?”

“Well, I don’t know... Not that I didn’t think ahead, mind, but my plans were mostly for raising her right to prevent that from ever happening.”

“That was my folks’ plan too; didn’t turn out so good for them...”

“So what about them, then? What did they do?”

“Oh, they started out by taking it to the boy’s folks. They were a rich couple of hot shot city slickers from Chicago, so of course they’d spoiled him rotten. When Ma and Pa brought it to their attention their boy had knocked my sister up, they just said ‘We’ll pay for the abortion.’ Like, you know, they just figured up front that was what my folks would do. My folks weren’t having none of that! Said ‘No, we’re not killing the little baby for the sins of the father. We want child support.’”

“Did they get it?”

“Yeah, they did. His folks were mighty upset to be sure, talking like we should oughta be grateful they was gonna pay anything at all, and they’d throw us out if we kept saying we wanted more than that and we’d get nothing; but then Pa goes and says ‘Well, I reckon we’ll be hauling your rotten little brat’s filthy rotten carcass into criminal court for statutory rape, then. Eighteen’s old enough to be tried as an adult, and fifteen’s not old enough to give legal consent in this state, you know. I wonder how being on that sex offender registry would suit him?’ and stuff like that. So they settled; got a contract lawyer who worked up a contract to keep quiet about it, and they ponied up a huge check that made my folks instant millionaires.”

“Wow. You never told me that story before, Francis; but think about those age of consent laws they mentioned. I’ve not checked them lately, but aren’t there any of those Romeo and Juliet laws here in Alabama?”

“There are, yeah. If that boy had been a day under eighteen when he knocked her up, he could’ve probably beat the rap in court if his folks hired a pricey enough lawyer. She’d only just turned fifteen, but seventeen minus fifteen is two if you’re only counting ages by the year, and maybe a judge and jury would agree that’s how the law works.”

“So, to make a long story short, his parents were rich and they paid through the nose to keep your parents from pressing charges. The difference for us is that I guess your family and mine are doing pretty well, but we aren’t exactly rolling in cash like that boy’s parents. If you’re proposing what I think you are, we’re talking about my little seven-year-old and your eight-year-old. Again, I haven’t checked the laws here lately, but if Alabama is anything like other states, I bet getting any girls that young pregnant—even if we did it artificially—would be breaking loads of child abuse laws!”

“No doubt; but we’d have grand-babies.”

“And we’d be in prison for the rest of our lives!”

“Or until the laws got changed.”

“Like that would ever happen!”

“Like I say, Meg: when the laws don’t follow reality, reality won’t follow the laws. When those laws were passed, girls weren’t usually going on the rag in grade school; and more importantly, the women weren’t going off it in their twenties. If I’m right, and no gal young or old has much time left to have her babies, how long would it really take the rest of the world to start seeing things my way?”

“I can’t believe we’re even discussing this.”

“Yet here we are, Meg. Here we are.”


	6. Persuasion

Francis didn’t succeed at persuading Megan that day, nor the next, nor even the rest of the week as they struggled with their little daughters’ ordeals. With the help of the pain medication, Elisa’s cramps gradually diminished to manageable levels by the third day of her period, while Clara’s family learned how to stay out of her way and avoid provoking her wrath on the day she reached the apogee of her snappish mood. Even once the girls’ periods were over and they were back to being their usual cheerful and playful selves, however, news from the world outside the neighborly Williams and Williamson residences seemed to be conspiring to keep the mothers’ minds drifting back to their families’ reproductive futures.

Among the many unreasonable demands the teachers’ unions and their allies were making on Alabama’s state legislature was a call for a disturbingly comprehensive and thorough sexual education program to be instituted in elementary schools that would “inform” students as young as Chloe and her kindergarten classmates of the existence of a wider variety of kinks and fetishes and deviant sexual acts than was known to many a veteran porn star. To this demand, Alabama’s government absolutely refused to offer any concessions whatsoever, while the teachers’ unions and their allies likewise absolutely refused to give it up. As if to emphasize just how thoroughly brazenly hypocritical the illegal strikers were, they also absolutely refused to publish so much as an executive summary of this proposed curriculum for the general public’s consumption as the governor had politely requested, though many of the extremely dirty details managed to leak out for public consumption anyway thanks in no small part to the undercover investigative efforts of reporters from certain alternative news outlets online.

As the illegal strike dragged on, the public’s mood curdled and grew exceedingly hostile to the illegal strikers and their allies, with many wondering why their state government hadn’t simply fired such obviously worthless “employees” already. In fact, the governor was planning to do just that, but circumstances were not very favorable to this plan just yet: as the statewide shortage of substitutes for the striking teachers demonstrated, finding permanent replacements so the schools could reopen in full was going to take some time. Meanwhile, thugs though they were, the strikers’ allies on the picket lines continued to restrain themselves from actual violence—if not so much from rude gestures and words in an attempt to bait the police keeping them in check into attacking them first to provide them with an excuse to riot; but so far the police were refusing to take the bait.

As Francis had predicted, the ages at which women were reaching menopause continued to plunge, with a majority of female college students now reporting they were no longer having periods. For a few of them, as chance would have it, this turned out to be because they were quite willfully pregnant: having rightly anticipated they would soon be unable to have any children, some of them had gone on wild raw-dogging sprees with their boyfriends... or fiances... or even husbands; a smaller—and yet quite sizable and widespread—spree of quickie coed engagements and marriages had also accompanied these orgies of eleventh-hour attempted reproduction. For the majority, however, the proper diagnosis—professional or otherwise—did indeed turn out to be the extremely premature menopause they’d fearfully or gleefully anticipated; for purposes of either celebration or consolation, the campus-wide raw-dogging sex orgies continued unabated as some fraternities and other organizations started holding “burning rubber” parties at which many rebellious students of either sex publicly incinerated all their contraceptives on massive bonfires in proclamation of their “liberation” from the “romantic sterility” of the “safe sex” practices their parents and teachers and professors had previously taught them.

Meanwhile, the first reports of older teens and high-school-aged girls prematurely losing their fertility began to make the rounds in media outlets of every kind worldwide, sparking panic in more than a few teenage schoolgirls’ parents and teachers and the girls themselves. In less than a month, the average age at which premature menopause was striking had declined by a full five years. How much further would the trend continue, and at what cost to the afflicted individuals personally and humanity in general? Many teen girls, not caring to wait for the answer, were now discreetly sleeping around behind their parents’ backs and quite deliberately getting themselves pregnant; and more disturbingly, others were openly having sleepovers with boys to impregnate themselves with full approval and support from both the boys’ and the girls’ parents.

“How long before it’s the tweens doing that?” Francis asked Megan, as they sat perusing an online article on the subject of this disturbing new trend at Jack’s computer while he was away at Dan’s house. “How long before your Dan or my Jack gets one of their invitations? Especially if anyone finds out they’ve got working baby batter already.” A week ago, while cleaning out her son’s trash can for a garbage run to the county dump, Francis had brought one of his used tissues from it to Megan, who’d put it under her microscope and confirmed he was also making sperm now.

“I get it, Francis,” grumbled Megan. “You don’t have to be so subtle about saying ‘I told you so’ like that. Did I tell you yet, I tried to look up Alabama’s age of consent laws on the state government’s official website today, and it told me to try again later because there was too much traffic right now?”

“It’s still at sixteen years old unless your beau is less than two years apart from you, last I checked,” said Francis.

“That’s still right, at least if that second-hand version of it I got from some law firm’s site is still in effect,” said Megan. “I don’t imagine that law’s changed much since 2020 when that version was published, or they’d almost certainly have updated it by now.”

“It’ll be changing soon enough, I reckon; but even if it doesn’t, who’s gonna enforce it? The police have their hands full with them teachers on that silly strike of theirs, and you’ve seen some of the sicko stuff them pervert teachers are wanting to push on all our boys and girls alike!”

“Gotta admit, I never thought I’d see the day they’d say kindergartners needed to know all about things like fisting and pegging and rainbow parties.”

“I don’t even know what half that stuff means myself.”

“Believe me, you should be grateful you don’t. Anyway, I’m pretty sure a lot of that traffic is from people wanting to know about the legalities of getting an underage girl pregnant.”

“That means if things go on the way they have been, we could easily get lost in a crowd.”

“Of course, even if it is legal for a boy as much as two years older than the girl to get her pregnant, Dan is three years older than Clara and Jack is four years older than Elisa. Also, I seem to recall the cutoff for that Romeo and Juliet law was at age twelve; below that, if your son or mine were to go fooling around with one of his eleven-year-old classmates, the little lovebirds could both be charged with statutory rape.”

“Wow, Meg! You sounded like one of them bloodsucking lawyers just now.”

“You pick up a few things working as an intern at a law office. That’s what I was doing when I met Jim.”

“All this time we’ve known each other, you never told me that before.”

“You never asked; that’s something else I picked up working there: if they don’t ask, you don’t tell.”

“Well, I reckon that’s good advice. How’s this grab ya: if I don’t accuse you and you don’t accuse me, what’s the crime?”

“You don’t get around the law that easily: if the girls turn up pregnant at school, I’m pretty sure the teachers are required by law to report it. Then, if the authorities figure out we had some part in this, we get slapped with child sexual abuse charges and contributing to the delinquency of a minor and maybe moral turpitude among other things.”

“And if they don’t go back to school? If this strike that’s already gone on longer than I thought possible doesn’t end, or if we just pull them out and homeschool them for a while?”

“Somebody still has to help them with giving birth. At their age, it almost certainly would have to be by cesarean section.”

“True, but that’d be about nine months from n— uh, from whenever they catch. Legally, it’ll be a whole new ballgame by then, I’m thinking.”

“Maybe. Still, if worst came to worst, I’d want as few people as possible to know about it. Our children need to know what they’re doing, but their fellow students and teachers at school do not. You and I need to know what they’re doing, but nobody else we know does; I’m going to say, not even our husbands, at least at first.”

“Not even your Jim and my Joe? Why—”

“Because if they’re out of the loop, the law won’t punish them as harshly. Children need a responsible father to raise them, and our sons just aren’t old enough to be that responsible. Their fathers are going to have to take over for them.”

“And they can’t do that if they go to prison; I see what you’re getting at, Meg. But what about when they do find out?”

“The more they have to figure it out on their own, the less complicit they’ll be in the eyes of the law. We can’t keep them in the dark forever, but we don’t need to help them find their way to the light either, if you catch my drift.”

“Yeah, if I know my Joe good as I’m thinking, he might not figure it out ’til he hears the baby crying... but what about you, Meg? Your hubby might not have the most common sense, but he seems awfully quick on the uptake to me.”

“He’s my project, Francis; let me worry about that. He was rather disappointed too when he found out my missed period wasn’t because I was having another baby, you know.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking Joe will come around to my way of thinking too, once he’s over the shock of finding out he’s going to be a granddaddy instead of being a daddy again.”

“The point is, if we want more babies in our families, we need to keep our secrets as long as we can among as few people as we can so that by the time the truth does finally come out, it’ll be as good as a done deal already.”

“Yeah, I been thinking about that; if we want our boys and girls to help us keep the secret, how’s about we get them thinking it’s been their idea all along?”

“That would certainly be a big help to our master plan. What do you propose?”

“Well, for starters, let’s get them all under one roof from now on. Your boy Dan’s already sweet on my Clara, ain’t he? And though he ain’t saying so, I know my Jack’s got your Elisa on his mind a lot lately, the way he looks at her every time he sees her.”

“Yes... and if he got to keep looking at her that way to his heart’s content...” Megan had, in fact, noticed the way Jack looked at Elisa in those brief moments he saw her outside her room when he was visiting Dan: the look of a starving cat seeing a mouse confined safely out of its reach within a wire cage. She little doubted her son was looking at Clara in much the same way when he happened to spot her while visiting his friend. “Well, go on. What else?”

“We could also... you know, tell our girls everything about the birds and bees; everything they ask us about, and then some, and then get them to keep asking. While we’re at it, let it slip that their big brother’s best friend thinks they’re pretty, ask them don’t they think he’s cute too; that sort of thing.”

“Yes... Yes...!” Megan absentmindedly touched the tips of all her fingers together, feeling a lot like a scheming matriarch in an animated adaptation of an old fairy tale. “Then what?”

“Well... I’m thinking after we’ve been at it a while, we arrange one of them sleepovers... let’s say in Spring; my little Chloe’s got a birthday coming up then, and me and Joe have been thinking it’s time she got her own room. We throw her a big party, y’all come over to celebrate it with us, and then you leave Dan and Elisa to play with their friends when you go back home. I call you later, saying we’re all having such a good time, and can’t they stay with us tonight? And you say...?”

“’Yes.’ Yes, yes, yes! And for their sleeping arrangements...”

“It won’t be the first time they’ve slept over, but it’ll be the first time the brother and sister switch rooms with each other; Dan in Clara’s room, Elisa in Jack’s room, Chloe off by herself in the brand new bedroom we gave her as a birthday gift so she won’t get in their way. Joe and me will be having a private little party of our own, of course, down the hall with the door locked; and unless the house is on fire or something worse, we ain’t opening up for nobody or nothing ’til morning.”

“Nothing? Even if you hear strange noises?”

“Jack used to scream about monsters under his bed when he was small, and so did Clara, but Joe always said ‘Let ’em scream. Life’s tough all over, and they gotta learn to deal with it.’ He sure ain’t gonna open up for a few groans or giggles, take it from me.”

“Huh... that’s kinda harsh of him... but it sounds like you’ve got all your bases covered. Of course, he probably won’t even notice anyway because you two will be making some groans and giggles yourself, I hope.” Megan smirked knowingly at her friend.

“Naturally.” Francis flashed the same smirk back.

“On the whole, that sounds like a plan and a half to me, Francis. Now, let’s get started on getting the kids together...”

The next day, when Dan finished his last virtual class over at Jack’s house, he was a bit surprised when his mother’s car pulled into the driveway and she turned up at the front door with his little sister in tow. He thought maybe something had happened and she was coming to take him somewhere, but instead she cheerfully informed him she was coming to visit with Jack’s mother today, whereupon he thought he and Jack were going to have to leave and go to his house instead. “Aw, Mom, we were about to try that _Alien Nations_ game we finally got downloaded,” he objected.

“Oh, don’t let us stand in your way, now. You boys go ahead and play your game. I’m sure Clara and Chloe can find something for Elisa to do here to keep her out of your way,” she replied quite casually.

Dan wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. He searched his mother’s face for any hint of humor or sarcasm, but wasn’t finding any. Just then, Jack emerged from his room, saw his friend’s cute little sister and mother standing there, and said “Aw, man! I just got that game installed, too...”

“Well, you boys go play it, then,” Jack’s mother chimed in. “The girls won’t give you any trouble... will you, Clara and Chloe?”

“Course not!” said Clara, who’d just emerged from her room.

“No, Ma,” promised Chloe, who was right behind her.

“Tell you what, girls, how about a board game?” Dan’s mother suggested. “It’s been a while since I’ve played one, and since we’re all here...”

“Let’s play _Life_ ,” said Jack’s mother.

Discombobulated at this sudden turn of events, Dan looked over at Jack to see if he could make any better sense of the situation, but his friend just shrugged, threw up his hands, and then retreated to his computer in his bedroom as instructed. Dan quickly followed suit.

As soon as he’d closed the door behind him, he said “Just what the heck is going on?” in a voice just barely above a whisper.

Jack shrugged again and said in a similarly soft voice: “Ya got me. Maybe the pod people got them?”

“I mean, your sisters and mine, in the same house with us? I thought they were trying to keep us apart.”

“And they’re playing a board game on the kitchen table? Seriously? Ma always told them to stay in their room whenever you were here with me before.”

“My mom did the same thing with Elisa when you were around.”

“Tell you what, _you_ sit here and play this game for a while. I’m going out there to, uh... you know, fetch some snacks.”

Dan sat down and started up the game as proposed, but he had trouble concentrating on the game’s opening cut scenes and tutorial knowing that not too far away on the other side of the bedroom door, his beloved fantasy girl Clara was right there at the kitchen table. His attempts to extend his fantasies to other girls from school had failed miserably: a camera was not especially flattering to any of his female classmates’ faces even when focused on just one of them in fairly good lighting; in the not-at-all-flattering lighting of the bedrooms from which most of them were broadcasting, with their faces each confined to a tiny rectangular portion of his screen during his virtual classes, absolutely none of them were capable of appealing to him in any way. So now he continued to fill his erotic fantasies with the lithe and lovely face and form of the one girl he knew whose appearance in person—brief as the glimpses he’d been allowed of her had been—appealed to him anywhere in any lighting.

Jack, likewise, was taking his time carrying out his stated intent to get some snacks from the fridge in the kitchen so he could feast his eyes on the rare and beautiful sight of sweet little Elisa sitting at the kitchen table in his house. Though their video feeds during virtual classes had helped him remember (at least vaguely) how the prettier girls at school had looked back when he had been attending in person, the desires they had once awakened in him were truly nothing but a memory now. The one beauty and desire that dominated his thoughts when he closed his eyes in the darkness to conjure up a vision of loveliness was hers—the wiggling and giggling little girl in her form-fitting turtleneck and overalls currently hovering over the game at the table as she spun the wheel and took her turn.

When Jack finally returned with the snacks as promised, Dan couldn’t help noticing he hadn’t brought any drinks to go with the “ants on a log” and peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches he’d retrieved from the fridge along with several single-serving bags of cheese puffs and potato chips from the pantry. “All that sticky and starchy stuff, and you didn’t think to get something to wash it down? How about you fiddle with these little blue squashy guys while I go get something to drink,” he said, and then he was out the door and into the kitchen before his friend could say another word.

Jack nonetheless sat down and restarted the game to have a look at the introductory cut scenes and the tutorial for himself while munching down one of those pieces of celery slathered with peanut butter and topped with three raisins his friend had taught him how to make known as “ants on a log.” Annoyingly wholesome as it was, this was one of those nutritious “health foods” he’d discovered he actually rather liked once his friend introduced him to it. Behind his beautiful baby sister, his books about sex, and all the stuff he knew about computers and classic gaming, this was by his reckoning probably the fourth greatest thing to which Dan had introduced him.

Speaking of Dan and his beautiful baby sister, Jack could hardly help noticing it took an awful lot more time for his friend to get something to drink than it really should—if that had been all he’d gone to the kitchen to do. Obviously, in all that time taken ostensibly to get himself two glasses from the cupboard and a carton of milk from the fridge, he’d probably been taking a good long gander at Clara. Well, two could play that game.

“What, you didn’t bring any iced tea?” said Jack.

“Jack, you know I don’t drink iced tea,” said Dan.

“Well, I do. You know, it looks like we can skip right to playing the Amazons in this here game, and I think they’d be a lot more fun. Come have a look-see at them out while I go get that iced tea,” said Jack, motioning to Dan to take the seat he’d just vacated as he slid out past him and made his way back to the kitchen to have another look at Elisa while fetching the pitcher of iced tea. To make things even better, when he got there, he discovered his mother already had the pitcher of iced tea out of the fridge and was passing it around the table. Naturally, he had to wait for everyone (including lovely little Elisa) to finish pouring herself a drink before he asked if he could borrow it; and naturally, his mother allowed him to have it as long as he promised to bring it right back and put it back in the fridge after he’d poured his own.

Dan and Jack spent the rest of the afternoon coming up with excuses to leave their video game to each other and go watch each other’s attractive little sisters playing their board game at the kitchen table. Francis and Megan immediately picked up on—and approved—what their sons were doing, but were careful to say nothing about it other than to exchange a few knowing smiles with each other every time one boy or the other came traipsing into the kitchen. On the whole, all the gals at the table had a good time that day, and later that night when everybody went to bed, each of the boys had more intensely and vividly erotic fantasies about what he longed to do with his best friend’s ravishingly lovely little sister than he’d ever had before.

Neither their sons nor daughters ever asked about the new policy, and neither mother ever offered them any explanation; but when Francis brought Clara and Chloe over to play with Elisa the next day while Jack was there visiting Dan, each of the boys soon came to realize that—for whatever reason—their mothers no longer wanted to keep the girls apart from them. In the days and weeks that followed, Dan and Jack gradually got bolder with their barely covert ogling and flirtations, joining in with the girls and their mothers for such activities as could be considered appropriate for the whole family (such as board games and watching movies) and deliberately neglecting to discourage any of the gals from coming into either boy’s bedroom to watch them or even sometimes take a turn at the controls when they were playing their video games. (Even Chloe was welcome with them, since anywhere she went, Clara and Elisa were likely to turn up soon as well.)

Francis and Megan eventually started leaving the children to themselves more when they were over at the Williams house, since—they explained—they were busy preparing a surprise for Chloe’s rapidly approaching sixth birthday. As the big day rapidly approached, they also started leaving the children to their own devices when they were at the Williamson residence as well, going over to the other house to “take care of some business.” All any of the children knew about this “business” was that it evidently had something to do with that one bedroom next to the girls’ that their parents had mostly been using to store old stuff ever since they’d stopped using it as a nursery back when Chloe turned four and was sent to bunk with Clara; a room which now had a lock installed on its door which was always locked whenever any of the children were there, but from which they’d recently noticed some smells of fresh paint and sawdust emanating.

Francis and Megan’s plans for their children’s reproductive futures were apparently going swimmingly so far: with each of their sons on board with the other’s interest in his little sister, the boys and girls mixed freely now, and they had occasionally seen Clara and Elisa snuggling up to Dan and Jack respectively when they were sitting on Dan’s bed playing games on his Retron 3 or even sitting on the boys’ laps when they were sitting at either boy’s computer and didn’t feel like cluttering up the bedroom with more than one or two extra chairs. Though being in a group kept them all from getting too openly amorous with their cuddling and caresses, let alone removing any clothing, Francis could swear she’d caught Jack “resting” his hands on Elisa’s thighs and trying to slip his fingers discreetly between them at one point when she was sitting on his lap watching her brother play a classic two-player “hot seat” computer game. Megan hadn’t seen her son being quite that bold with Clara, but she noticed he did tend to wrap his arms around the girl’s midriff and lay his chin on her shoulder whenever she was sitting on his lap, and that she wasn’t complaining about his “necking” with her this way at all.

Clara and Elisa had also both gone through a third menstrual cycle almost exactly one month after their second (a somewhat irregular regularity for girls to have so early in their years of potential childbearing, as Francis reminded Megan, though she swiftly retorted that one could hardly proclaim something a trend from just one sampling), and once again been respectively beset with short-tempered snappishness and cramps. However, with Dan and Jack being there this time to hold and comfort them through their rougher moments, the girls’ collective shark week (about nine days from the start of Clara’s period to the end of Elisa’s) turned into more of a strawberry week for them. For all their ulterior motives, Dan’s warm embraces and Jack’s gentle caresses truly did help calm the angry mood swings and soothe any dull aches the pain pills were not quite able to reach.

More importantly, these experiences had the boys and girls asking a lot of the right kinds of questions: Dan and Jack had both been subtly (as far as that term could apply to young boys in comparison to their mothers who were veritable experts at reading between conversational lines) probing their mothers with questions on such loaded subjects as how much trouble would they be in if they did happen to get a girl pregnant and would their parents still love them if they were to do something bad? In Clara’s case, the kind of questions she was asking were along the lines of whether she was pretty, and (when Francis opined that she was) whether boys would see her that way. As for Elisa, one of her better questions one night when her mother was tucking her into bed after one of her roughest days had to do with just how much longer she would have to endure these awful cramps and whether there might be some solution more permanent than just taking pills for the pain.

“Well, when I was... not your age, but—you know, on my monthlies just like you—I had some terrible cramps too,” Megan told her. “It got so bad in my later years that when I was at my gynecologist’s—that’s the doctor who deals with this kinda thing, dear—for my yearly checkup, I asked him that same question: ‘Doc, am I gonna have to put up with this every month for the rest of my life? Isn’t there any way I can get rid of these horrible cramps for good?’ and you know what he said?”

“What?” Elisa was giving her mother her full attention.

“He asked me ‘Do you have a boyfriend? Some steady sweetie who might make good husband material someday?’ and I said ‘What if I did?’ Then he says ‘Well, one thing I’ve noticed in all my years doing this job is that after a gal has her first baby, that’s usually when she never has any more cramps ever again.’”

“And was he right?”

“You bet he was! Your father putting your brother Dan in me was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because after he came along, I never had another cramp.”

“And how long did it take you to get married to Daddy and have Danny?”

“Oh, well, I was just eighteen and on my way to college when the doctor told me that, and I didn’t meet and marry your father until I’d gotten out and gotten a job and turned twenty-three. So... you know... five years.”

“Five years!?” Elisa looked like she was about to cry. “That’s like forever!”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, honey,” Megan said, putting on her best poker face to keep her daughter from seeing her delight at how she’d reacted. “I’ll admit, though, I was tempted to look up my ex from my sophomore year—that’s the tenth grade, dear—and get him to make a baby in me just to be done with those cramps already.”

“Why didn’t you, Mommy?”

“Because I knew better than that. He would have been a bad daddy, never sticking around to take care of the baby; not like your daddy.”

“But Daddy’s supposed to take care of me!”

“Yes, darling, and he knows that; but that’s not what all daddies are like.”

“Clara’s daddy takes care of her.”

“Yes, and that’s because he’s a good daddy, just like your daddy.”

“How do you know if a daddy’s gonna be good or bad?”

“Oh, believe me, honey: I know.”

“How?”

“Well now, that’s quite a story. If you’ll lie back and pull the covers up over you, though, I’ll tell it to you.”

Elisa immediately did as she was told. “Is this gonna be one of those ‘Once upon a time’ stories?” she asked.

“Oh, well, it’s a true story; but if that’s the way you want it...”

“Say it was once upon a time.”

“Oh, all right, then. Once upon a time, when your mommy was just sixteen years old, she knew this one girl in high school who was in some of the same classes with her.”

Elisa sat up and pouted. “Mommy, you don’t have to talk like that. I’m not a baby!”

Megan shrugged. “You’re the one who asked for a ‘Once upon a time’ story.”

“Yeah, but not in that baby talk. Tell it like you were talking before.”

“Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be, eh? You want to hear this story or not?”

“I do! I do!”

“Well, you’ve had a rough day, so I’ll indulge you; but first, lie down already!”

Elisa quickly laid her head back on the pillow and pulled up the covers again. “You got it, Mommy.”

“All right... let’s try this again. Once upon a time, when I was just sixteen years old, there was this one girl in my high school who was in some of the same classes with me.”

“Was she your friend?”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that; not really. We weren’t enemies, either—don’t get me wrong. We just didn’t have much in common. I almost never saw her outside of those classes.”

“So what was she like?”

“So she was rather popular with the boys—that means they all liked her, dear—and if she wanted a boy to take her out on a date—like, you know, so she could have some fun with him out around town—she never had any trouble picking one out from the pack of them she always had hanging around her.”

“Don’t you mean the flock of them, Mommy?”

“Well, if it had been a boy with lots of girls hanging around him, I might say they were a flock; but boys and girls are different that way: boys hang out in packs, while girls hang out in flocks. Trust me, you’ll understand the difference better when you’re older. Now, I’ve got to get on with this story.”

“Then go on.”

“Anyway, as I say, she always had her pick of boys who wanted to go out with her; but there was this one boy she liked more than all the others because he wasn’t like those other boys. He didn’t hang around her all the time hoping she’d look his way. He had his own flock of girls hanging around him hoping he’d take them out on a date, you see.”

“So he was popular with the girls just like she was popular with the boys.”

“Now you’re getting it, Elisa. Yes, he was popular with the girls.” In fact, Megan recalled, she had been one of the girls in that flock hanging around him and hoping he’d look her way; but she didn’t think her daughter needed to know about that right now. “Anyway, she liked him for being a little harder to get than the other boys, and he liked her for the same reason. So, she soon took to going steady with him—which means she and he were only going out on those dates with each other, and everyone else wanting to date him or her was just tough out of luck.”

“But Mommy, couldn’t those boys and girls just date each other?”

“Of course they could, and once they’d gotten over their disappointment, that’s what they mostly did; but those are their stories, and those are stories for another time.” In fact, that one ex-boyfriend of hers Megan had mentioned in her story about the gynecologist’s advice had been one of those disappointed boys just as she had been one of those disappointed girls; but again, she didn’t think her daughter needed to hear that story at the moment. “So, the two of them were steady sweeties, as we liked to say back then; and for the next several months, they were always together everywhere they went, whether they were out on the town or going to parties and stuff.”

“Everywhere? Did they go to the bathroom together?”

Megan laughed. “Well, almost everywhere. I don’t think either of them ever sneaked into a bathroom with the other, or at least I sure hope not; but remember, I didn’t see her much outside my classes. I didn’t get invited to people’s parties much back then either, or spend much time in the parts of town where they were dating. I mostly heard about this because she liked to gossip with her friends in school about where she’d been with him and all the fun they’d been having. It was annoying, really.”

“So then what happened?”

“Well, for a long time, they seemed like a prince and princess out of one of those ‘Once upon a time’ fairy tales I’ve read to you. We all—everybody else at that school and I—thought once they were done with high school, they’d go to college together and get married somewhere along the way and live happily ever after, but that’s not what happened in the end.”

“It’s not?”

“No, it wasn’t; because, you see, a lot can happen to a boy and a girl who’ve got two years of high school left to go. Now, exactly what happened between them—how he did what he did to her, maybe I should say—happened over summer break that year, so I don’t know exactly how it happened. What I do know is that when she got back to school in the fall, she was pregnant.”

“Pregnant?”

“She was ‘with child’ or ‘had one on the way’ as some of us put it back then, or she was ‘knocked up’ as your friend Clara’s mom likes to say. She had a baby in her uterus, or her womb. Remember those things we talked about when you started bleeding?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“So as I say, she was pregnant, and she had been for about two or three months, so he must have put that baby in her not too long after we got out of school on that break, see?”

“She let him put his—?”

“Yes.”

“The way you let Daddy—?”

“Yes, just like when we made you.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I told you, honey, it’s one of the reasons boys and girls want to get together in the first place. It’s how a husband and wife show they love each other very much.”

“But they weren’t married.”

“No, they weren’t.”

“So why? Did she have cramps, and want to get rid of them?”

Megan chuckled. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know what went differently for her at that time of the month, actually, if anything. Besides, I told you, nobody had told me yet you could get rid of cramps that way back then; and I don’t think anybody had told her, either.”

“So why did she do it?”

“Well, as I’ve told you before, sex is a lot of fun whether it gets you a baby or not. It’s not like your daddy and I made either of you kids on our first try, you know.”

“So she tried for a baby because it was fun?”

“No, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t trying for that baby—and I’m quite sure he wasn’t. What they were trying to do—as I’d have told you if you didn’t keep interrupting—was have all the fun of sex and skip having the baby.”

“Could they do that?”

“Well, a lot of people have tried, honey. I won’t lie and say nobody ever succeeds at that, but she sure didn’t.”

“Or he.”

“No, he sure didn’t either. As I was telling you, she turned up pregnant with his baby that fall, but he didn’t turn up at all. She didn’t want to talk about him much, but I later heard from her friends that he started going to a different school across town after that, and he wanted nothing more to do with her or the baby.”

“What a jerk!”

“Well, there you are: he was a bad daddy, you see. So anyway, she was on her own for deciding what to do with her baby. Some people were telling her she should just kill it and be done with it, but—”

Elisa sat up and cried “Kill the baby? That’s cruel!”

Megan smiled sadly. “You know that, and I know that, honey. In fact, I think everyone in the world knows that, deep down in their hearts; but a lot of people are like that boyfriend of hers when a baby they don’t want comes along: they only care about themselves, and if that means murdering the baby to keep from having to take care of it, that’s what they’ll do.”

“But—”

“You want to hear the rest of the story? Then lie down already.”

“I’m sorry, Mommy.” Once again, Elisa laid her head back on the pillow and pulled the covers back up over her shoulders.

“Anyway, she wasn’t cruel enough to murder the baby just to keep from having it the way those evil people were telling her to do, but she didn’t really think she wanted to keep the baby either. She wasn’t popular with the boys anymore, for one thing: none of them wanted to date a girl carrying another boy’s baby. She also found out most of the girls who’d been her friends were actually what’s called a fair-weather friend: someone who’ll gladly hang out with you in the good times when you’re having fun, but when bad times come along and you’re in trouble—like when you’re pregnant in high school—that kind of friend runs off and pretends she never knew you and leaves you to fend for yourself.”

“I’ve had friends like that.”

“I’m sure you have. So that’s what happened with her: only a few friends, the ones who truly were her friends, continued to hang around with her then. They were telling her since she didn’t want to kill the baby, but she didn’t want to keep it either, maybe what she ought to do was find a couple of grownups who wanted to have a baby but couldn’t, and get them to adopt hers—that is, take her baby and be a mommy and daddy to it.”

“Like Rita in my class? She’s adopted.”

“Is she, now? I did not know that.”

“Yeah, she says she’s got the mommy and daddy who adopted her, and then she’s got a real mommy and daddy somewhere, but doesn’t know where.”

“That sounds about right. So this girl—like Rita’s real mommy—was looking to give her baby away to somebody else—like the mommy and daddy who adopted Rita.”

“You think maybe she could have been Rita’s real mommy?”

“No, absolutely not, and I’ll tell you why: first, this was when I was sixteen, remember? Rita’s in your class, she must be about your age, and this was long before either of you were ever born. Second... well, her baby was a boy, though we didn’t find that out until later for reasons I’m about to tell you. Third, and finally... well, just let me finish my story, and you’ll find out.”

“Finish it, Mommy.”

“All right. Let’s see... where was I? Ah, yes: the girl’s friends were telling her to give the baby up for adoption. Well, that was pretty much what she’d been thinking to do anyway, so they didn’t really have to talk her into it. What she did need them to help her with doing was telling her own mommy and daddy she was pregnant; see, she’d kept that hidden from them up until this time by wearing clothes a little too big for her and things like that. She figured if she could find somebody to adopt the baby first, then they wouldn’t be so upset when she told them about her getting herself pregnant.”

“And did that work?”

“Yes, it did. I wasn’t there when she and her friends went to tell them about it, but from what one of those friends told me later, her mommy and daddy were pretty upset just as she’d feared; but they did take it a whole lot better—just as she’d hoped—when she told them she and her friends had already found somebody to adopt the baby when it was born.”

“So after she gave up the baby, _then_ did everyone live happily ever after?”

“Oh, no, no... you’re getting way ahead of me, honey. You can’t just drop off a baby with his new mommy and daddy on your way out of the hospital right after you’ve given birth, you know. You have to meet with a lot of people and sign a lot of papers, and if you aren’t eighteen yet like she wasn’t, your mommy and daddy have to be there to meet with those people and sign those papers too. It was all very long and hard and tiresome for all three of them, and her friends too—not to mention the baby wasn’t going to be born for another six months or so. In the end, though, everything was arranged, and the big day had come when the baby was finally going to be born...”

“ _Then_ she gave it up and everybody lived happily ever after?”

“Remind me again: who’s telling this story?”

“You are. Sorry, Mommy.”

“Apology accepted. Well, to make a long story short, the birth was a long and hard and tiresome labor just like everything leading up to it had been. As with almost everything else that happened in this story, I wasn’t there to see it myself; only her mommy and daddy and those few friends who’d been there for her when she needed them were invited; so it was one of them who told me what happened next. The baby was born, a healthy little boy just as they’d expected; the couple adopting the baby had wanted to know, so they’d paid the doctors to take a picture before the baby was born.”

“How’d they get the camera in there to take a picture?”

“Oh, well, they didn’t really have to. They used a special kind of camera that could take pictures right through the walls of her womb, you see, called an ultrasonic 3D. So anyway, her baby was born, and the new mommy and daddy were flying in from Texas; everything about the adoption was arranged and ready to go, except for one last thing: there was this paper she had to sign saying she was giving up the baby for good and he would belong to the couple adopting him from now on. When they brought it in for her to sign, she was lying there in the hospital bed with her little newborn baby boy in her arms. Everybody thought the adoption was as good as a done deal already and expected her to sign, but to their surprise, she didn’t.”

“She didn’t?”

“She didn’t. She wouldn’t. She started screaming ‘He’s mine! This is my baby! I’m his mommy and I’m not giving him up to anybody!’ The girl who told me about this said she actually tore the paper right out of the hands of the man who was holding it and threw it on the floor, and started screaming about how she’d kill him if he tried to take her baby. He backed off in a hurry when she said that; they all did.”

“Couldn’t they make her give him up anyway?”

“No, they couldn’t. They did have the doctors give her a drug to calm her down and make her sleep because they were afraid she was going to hurt somebody, and they did take the baby out of her arms once she was asleep, but only to put him in a little crib. Without her signing that paper, you see, they weren’t allowed to give him to the couple who wanted to adopt him. When she woke up again later, that couple and her own mommy and daddy and even her friends were all there pleading with her to sign that paper and give up the baby, but she just wouldn’t do it. No matter how they begged and scolded her for wasting the couple’s time and money, and even after her mommy and daddy actually threatened to throw her out and say she was no daughter of theirs anymore, she said the baby was hers and she was keeping him and that was that.”

“So what did they do then?”

“Well, she ended up keeping the baby after all just as she said; the couple who’d wanted to adopt him ended up having to go home empty-handed after all, and you can bet they had some hard feelings toward her. As for her mommy and daddy, they hadn’t really meant what they said about throwing her out, and I don’t think they lawfully could have even if they had meant it; but they did pretty much ground her forever, or at least for so long as she lived with them, so it was no more dating or going to parties for her from then on. After the school year ended, they sold their house and moved out of state with her and her baby, and I never heard from any of them ever again.”

“So nobody lived happily ever after? What kind of bedtime story is that, Mommy?”

Megan could only smirk sardonically. “It’s a true story from real life, honey, that’s what; and real life never promises you a happily ever after. That’s why I decided I’d rather go on getting cramps month after month and year after year rather than go get myself pregnant. While I don’t know what became of that girl after that, I’m sure she never suffered from any cramps ever again, if she ever had any in the first place; but did that really make life any better for anyone? Her son probably had to grow up in a broken home with no daddy, and for all I know, she could be living to this day with a mommy and a daddy who are still angry with her for not giving him up. How would you like to live like that?”

“Oh, that’d be sad.”

“Yes, and painful too. So, think you can deal with another five years or more of painful cramps instead?”

To Megan’s secret delight, Elisa cast her eyes down and took a long time to give a most hesitant answer: “I guess so...”

“Good.” Megan leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “Now close your eyes and go to sleep. You’ve had a rough day, but everything should be better by morning.”

“Yes, Mommy,” said Elisa, and closed her eyes as instructed. As Megan was making her way to the door, however, her daughter opened her eyes and asked “Mommy?”

“Yes, dear?” Megan tried not to sound as tired as she was.

“If I did have a baby, and I wanted to keep it, would you be that mad at me?”

Megan made sure to keep her back turned so Elisa couldn’t see the triumphant grin on her face. “At your age? I don’t think so; but then, I’m still young enough to be having babies myself. I might just take the baby for my own.”

“Take the baby!?” Elisa asked in a hilariously horrified tone. Megan didn’t have to turn around to know her daughter’s eyes had just snapped open, or listen for the rustling of the bed to know she’d just sat bolt-upright again. “Really, Mommy?”

“No, not really,” Megan fibbed, and turned her head just so Elisa could see her smirking. “I’m just teasing, dear. Lie down, close your eyes, and go to sleep.”

“Yes, Mommy.”

Megan left the room and closed the door, gleefully aware that even if Elisa did stay down and keep her eyes closed, it was going to be a long time before all the thoughts about sex and childbirth and motherhood running rampant through the little girl’s prematurely adolescent mind would likewise settle themselves down enough to allow her to get to sleep. Dan and Jack would not make very good fathers at their age, of course, any more than Elisa and Clara would have any significant mothering skills; but no adoptive couples would have to be flown in from anywhere either, since any and all babies they might have would be born into a household that already had a perfectly good veteran mother and father to adopt them. The only potentially fatal flaw in this plan was that the government might jail the veteran mother in question and forbid her to do any more mothering.

The way things were going in Alabama and the USA and the rest of the world, however, the chances of any government taking particular notice of the Williams and Williamson families’ covert reproductive activities were looking slimmer and slimmer. Premature menopause in older teen girls was now getting to be as regular a phenomenon as it had been in college girls just a month earlier, and panicking parents of girls as young as thirteen were quite deliberately turning a blind eye toward—or even encouraging—any of their youngest daughters’ sexual activities that “risked” getting them pregnant. Consequently, companies that manufactured condoms and other contraceptives were experiencing a severe slump in demand for their products that would have been financially disastrous for them, had they not already merged with companies in the fertility industry in anticipation of this trend and begun shifting their manufacturing resources toward producing aphrodisiacs and fertility enhancers and lubricants instead.

The standoff between Alabama’s government and the illegal strikers continued unabated with neither side offering any concessions or compromises, but mostly on stubborn inertia as the teachers’ unions and their allies’ enthusiasm for imposing their sexually perverse curriculum on Alabama’s public school system began to wane. With every teen girl statewide and countrywide and worldwide lately feeling a powerful cultural and personal urge to reproduce, even the vast majority of stridently self-proclaimed lesbians among fertile girls were experiencing a seemingly inexplicable sudden shift toward heterosexuality in their preferences, and deciding maybe they were bisexuals instead as they joined the other girls in their aggressive pursuit of boys for their wild reproductive orgies. Alabama’s governor and legislature, meanwhile, continued to hold the line during their fruitless “negotiations” with the strikers; they were almost certain time was on their side, as they surmised the illegal strike was crumbling and would soon collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and irrelevancy.

In the final weeks leading up to Chloe’s birthday party, Francis and Megan began hosting sleepovers for each other’s children. They started with Dan and Jack, presenting these stays to the girls as a “privilege” to which the boys were exclusively entitled due to their maturity. When the girls jealously insisted they could be just as mature at their ages, first Francis and then Megan “reluctantly” allowed them to try having slumber parties of their own. To ensure their children would think these sleepovers were entirely their own idea, both mothers made sure to schedule them only upon request.

Needless to say, the sleepovers were all a smashing success at achieving their intended effects. Since neither boy was willing to indulge his erotic fantasies manually in the presence of anyone else, and their mothers had deliberately made it difficult for either of them to find any privacy anywhere else in either house outside their own bedrooms, each of the boys typically just had to abstain during a sleepover and let his growing hunger for the other’s little sister remain unsatiated. As for the girls’ slumber parties, none of them happened to have taken place at the same time or house as any of the boys’ sleepovers; which meant on those nights, a boy either got to spy on his absent friend’s very-much-present little sister at the slumber party and then indulge his fantasies about her to his heart’s content later on, or he got to spend the night alone in a house even emptier than usual while he indulged his fantasies about his absent friend’s little sister.

Best of all, Francis and Megan had both noticed Clara and Elisa were starting to respond in kind in subtle ways to Dan and Jack’s own respective discreet displays of interest in them. If Dan had only been imagining Clara’s looking at him a certain way before, it was no longer any mere figment of his imagination now; and both mothers had spotted the clearly flirtatious way Elisa was posing for Jack lately whenever she caught him staring at her. Whenever the girls had any excuse to sit on the boys’ laps during some activity, they would do so, and their mothers had actually seen each girl grab her preferred boy’s arms and wrap them around her while sitting on his lap as if to say—in not so many words—she didn’t feel he was holding her closely enough.

The girls knew the effect they were having on the boys in general, if not all the specifics. They had been asking their mothers all the right kinds of questions and receiving the answers in words they could understand: each one knew her preferred boy liked her and thought her pretty, that he wanted her to sit on his lap and let him hold and cuddle with her every bit as much as she wanted to do so, and that he was thinking how much he’d like to put his baby in her just as much as she was thinking how much she’d like to let him. Both girls also intuited several things their mothers weren’t telling them: that they had deliberately been put together with the boys, that they were deliberately kept from being alone with their chosen boys, and that this was because each one would dare to do more than just snuggle with her chosen boy if she were allowed to be alone with him; also that they were supposed to feel the way they did about their chosen boys, that they would not be kept from being alone with them forever, and that something amazing was going to happen very soon.

The boys were not quite as intuitive as their little sisters, but they had working minds and senses, and they were asking a lot of the right kinds of questions and finding the right kinds of answers to them too. Each boy had noticed how quickly his best friend’s sister had warmed up to him after the mothers stopped keeping the boys and girls apart: how she had taken to returning his hungry gazes, how eager she was to sit on his lap at every opportunity, how she wanted him to hold and nuzzle and squeeze her in his arms and run his hands over her chest and her thighs every bit as much as he wanted to do all these things to her; and how every time these activities made a certain hidden part of his anatomy swell into a bulge in his lap that would once have been embarrassing and uncomfortable to him and made her giggle uneasily, she now actually seemed to encourage it to stay swollen by subtly squirming herself around on top of it. The boys had also noticed how, cold and curt and distant and quick to change the subject as their mothers typically were when asked questions about topics generally or specifically related to the personally and physically and socially complex process of making a baby with a girl (topics such as intimacy, and love, and pregnancy, and romance, and—of course—sex), neither of them actually seemed to be trying to discourage any intimacy between her son and the other’s daughter or (more tellingly) between the other’s son and her own daughter; on numerous occasions, neither mother could possibly have failed to notice where the one boy’s hands were on the other boy’s little sister—and on every one of these occasions, the mother had looked away and pretended not to have seen what she saw.


	7. Instruction

So the boys and girls alike continued to fascinate and frustrate and tease and torment each other while testing all the boundaries these numerous mixed messages had raised between them, just as their mothers intended. Finally, on the afternoon two days before the big day when they would all celebrate Chloe’s birthday, Megan and Francis left all five children ostensibly playing video games in Dan’s room (though they knew Chloe would be the one doing most of the actual gaming while the others necked and petted as much as they dared to behind her back) to go put a few final touches on what was to be the little kindergartner’s new bedroom at the other house. In addition to her serving as a “fifth wheel” to keep those two amorous young couples from making out too freely with with each other, Jim telecommuting in his study downstairs (as he usually was when he wasn’t out visiting with Joe in his “man cave” over weekends and other days when they had some time off) was nominally keeping an ear open for any cries of distress or other unusual noises from the children upstairs that might indicate there was some emergency.

When Francis returned with Megan around suppertime to take her children home, Chloe met them at the door with a worried look on her face. No, there was no emergency so far as she knew, which was why the little kindergartner had not gone down to the basement to fetch Jim (as she never wanted to unless she absolutely had to; she was afraid of going down there whenever the lights weren’t on, as they typically weren’t). However, she was clearly afraid of what the other children would do to her for “tattling” on them, as she insisted on quietly beckoning her mother and Mrs. Williamson to come see for themselves rather than explaining anything.

Chloe evidently wasn’t a very effective fifth wheel anymore: though the boys and girls were all still fully clothed and sitting up straight on the edge of the bed as they had been when Francis and Megan left, Clara had turned herself around on Dan’s lap and Elisa was likewise now facing Jack, and each boy and girl was brazenly (if somewhat clumsily) tugging at the other’s lips with his and her own. Smiling wryly at her friend, Megan motioned to Francis to make no sound, just wait and see how long it would take their children to realize they were busted. It took a long delay indeed before Dan first happened to look up from his lip-mashing with Clara to see his mother and hers watching all this amorous action with ambiguous expressions on their faces and the right eyebrow raised on each of their foreheads, not to mention his friend’s other little sister cowering a bit behind them and off to one side with her flushed face buried in her hands. He and his passionate little partner froze with the kind of fright that can only come from extreme abject embarrassment, and though they made no sound, that very silence was what also alerted Jack and Elisa to look up from their own awkward efforts at bumping lips with each other and likewise freeze with fright upon realizing their acts had an unexpected audience.

For another long and awkward stretch, nobody seemed to want to break the silence. Then Francis dropped her eyebrow, composed her face, and simply said “Get your coats, kids. We’re going home.” Megan likewise dropped her eyebrow and nodded at her own daughter.

Surprised and fearful for the uncertainty of what came next as they were, none of the children could think of any other response than to do as they were told. Clara carefully climbed up off Dan’s lap and Elisa likewise got up off of Jack, and then Chloe’s older brother and sister joined her in shuffling out of the room with their heads held up and eyes cast down, trying to make as dignified an exit as possible while going to get their coats from the foyer closet as instructed. Francis followed them out and drove them home, leaving Megan alone with her own son and daughter, to whom she simply said “Back to your own room, Elisa,” before turning and walking out herself.

She wasn’t even waiting around to make sure her daughter would do as she was told, for which Elisa and her brother both felt oddly grateful for some reason. Of course, like their friends and partners of passion who’d just left them, she would do as her mother told her since she was at a complete loss for the moment for anything else to do. The moment their mother was gone, Dan turned to his little sister and shrugged as if to ask what was taking her so long; when she took the hint and got up and left, he quietly closed and locked the door behind her, and laid himself back in his bed waiting for the other shoe to drop.

To his surprise, when there came a knock on Dan’s door, it was Elisa telling him Mommy was calling them to dinner rather than his mom demanding that he open up because she needed to have a talk with him (which would—of course—mean she was grounding him and sending him to bed without any dinner). While eating dinner in awkward silence with the rest of his family (his sister evidently had not been grounded either), he almost wished he’d guessed right the first time: a little hunger would have been far more bearable than this terribly tense mood he felt seemingly hanging in the air between his mother, sister, and himself even as Mom ate her food quite calmly and casually as if nothing had happened. His dad had brought his work laptop to the table from his study and was typing something on it between bites of the food on his plate, evidently completely oblivious to the little drama taking place between his wife and kids, which somehow made the whole ordeal even worse.

It was after dinner was mercifully over (he and his sister having both having eaten their plates empty and gotten back to their rooms in a hurry in order to shorten their torment) and his father was back down in his study still working late that Dan finally heard his mother knock and ask him if she could come in. Since he hadn’t locked the door on returning to his room (since it somehow seemed rather pointless to do so), he simply grunted an affirmation from his bed where he was lying in a funk. When his mom entered quietly and calmly closed the door behind her, he realized she still wasn’t here to punish him; which left him a little unsure what to say, but he felt like he needed to be the first to break the silence anyway.

“I guess it’s not a very good time to ask if I can sleep over at Jack’s tomorrow night,” he said rather sardonically; yet, he was also rather proud to have thought of something as clever as that to say off the top of his head in a moment like this.

Flashing the same wry smile at her son as she’d flashed at Francis earlier that afternoon, Megan replied “Well, no, though not because of anything you did. Actually, we were going to keep all you kids home tomorrow anyway, since your friend’s mother and I already had a few things we needed to be alone with each of you kids to discuss about the big day coming after it.”

“Chloe’s birthday? I know you and Jack’s mom wanna make it really special for her, but what’s the big deal? She’s only turning six.”

Megan’s smile broadened. “Oh... you’ll see. We don’t want you to spoil her surprise, so I can’t tell you anything more about that right now. Besides, that’s not what I’m here to discuss.”

Dan sat up in his bed; here it came, he was thinking. “What did you want to talk about, then? What happened this afternoon?”

Now she was smirking a little. “No, not exactly— Well, kinda. You really do like Clara, don’t you?”

“No kidding!” Dan cast his eyes downward. “I don’t think she’s just curious about me because her body wants a baby anymore. I think she really likes me when I’m holding her close. I wonder if she’d still like me so much if she knew what I do at night when I’m thinking about her.”

“If she really likes you as much as you think, she might need some time, but I think she could get over it. Still, it’s not like she really needs to know that, so I won’t tell her if you won’t.”

“Gee, thanks, Mom. That’s a real load off my mind.” Dan sounded neither particularly grateful nor relieved.

“No, I mean it: she was kissing with you today. I never would have done that with a boy when I was eight. I would have thought it was gross.”

“Heck, I thought it was gross. I still kinda do, but it feels nice.”

“So that wasn’t your idea?”

“No, it was hers. I was just holding her, you know, hugging her on my lap like I do when we’re watching someone else play, and my face was right there next to hers, and she turns around and kisses me! Like I say, it was gross, but it felt nice, and then she asks me ‘Won’t you kiss me back?’ and I didn’t really want to because Chloe and my little sister and my friend are all right there where they can see everything, but then she kinda wiggles around and gets in front of me and really plants one on me! So then I thought maybe I’d try it just so I’d know what it’s like, so I did, and the next thing you know...”

“Elisa and Jack are doing it too.”

“Right! And they were saying it was gross but it felt nice too, and so soon we’re all doing it when Chloe turns around and sees us kissing and says ‘Ewww! That’s gross!’ and we’re all like ‘Yeah, but it feels nice!’ and we’re laughing as she runs out going ‘Ick! Ick! Yuck!’”

“Poor kid. Well, that explains a lot, like why she didn’t want to say anything to us when her mother and I met her at the door. I know you guys don’t like Chloe very much because she’s always getting in your way, Dan, but you really ought to be nicer to her.”

“Hey, I never said I don’t like her! I like her just fine! Just... you know, not the way I like Clara.”

Now this was an interesting development, Megan thought. “You don’t mind that she gets in your way?”

“Like... how? She sure couldn’t stop us from kissing.”

A good point, Megan quietly conceded. Filing her son’s statements about Chloe away in her memories for later whenever the little kindergartner might happen to come up in some future discussion with Francis, she returned to the matter at hand. “Anyway, so you really liked kissing with Clara?”

Now that the whole story was out there, Dan didn’t feel so embarrassed about discussing it anymore. “Yeah!” he said.

“You want to do it again?”

“Of course!”

“Well, you’ll get your chance to do all that and more... two days from now.”

“Aw, I gotta wait that long?”

“Trust me, it’ll be worth the wait,” Megan said, opening the door and slipping out into the hall. “Until then, get some sleep. We’ll talk more about this tomorrow.”

“Uh... thanks, Mom... I guess,” said Dan, as she closed the door behind her. Relieved as he was that she did not disapprove of his kissing with Clara and would let him go on doing it (in two days, he reminded himself), he couldn’t help wondering why she’d left the discussion there. Just what was she up to? Later that night when he turned in, he thought of how good it had felt kissing with Clara earlier, how she’d liked him enough to try it on him just because she thought he might like it even though she too had started out thinking it was gross.

Then he wondered again what Clara would think if she knew about the rather gross things he did at night while imagining what it would be like to put a baby in her. Would she think it was gross, but understand he did it because it felt even nicer (a whole lot nicer, really) than kissing, or would she just be grossed out because it was also that much grosser than kissing? Thinking she might well react the latter way filled him with guilt and shame until he just couldn’t concentrate on his fantasies anymore; for the first time in months, he turned over and went to sleep without stroking any of his baby batter out first.

During the ride home, Jack and Clara spent their time waiting for the firestorm, but it never started. Their mama never even told them to go to their rooms when they got home; they just went there on their own, in part because that was what they’d expected her to say, and in part because that was what they usually did when they wanted to hide away from the world for a while as they did now. When their mama still said nothing to them other than to call both of them out for suppertime, Clara relaxed and began to believe no punishments or even lectures of any kind were forthcoming, while Jack maintained his suspicions to the contrary throughout the meal and well into the evening afterward.

Had their papa been home for supper, he would have found the silence around the table that night rather disquieting, and asked them why everyone from his wife on down the line to his little baby girl Chloe was saying nothing; but something, it seemed, had kept him out working late on this particular evening. Jack ate quickly, still leery of a potential blowup between any of the others sitting at the table, and rapidly retreated to his room as soon as he was finished. Clara did glower a bit at her little sister, since she blamed her in part for having gotten them caught, but said nothing aloud about it; and Francis simply had to struggle to keep a straight face, concealing her amusement at the tension between her children and pretending not to notice it as she casually chowed down on her portion of all this good food she’d prepared for her family (which—not at all coincidentally—included several of each member’s favorite dishes, including her own).

Only when his mama still didn’t say anything to him as he was turning in for the night did Jack finally come to realize she wasn’t going to, and had in fact never intended to. Strange as it seemed, he actually felt cheated somehow: hadn’t she been paying attention to what she’d caught him doing with Elisa (and Clara doing with his friend Dan, for that matter), and didn’t she care? Ma hadn’t even taken them to task for upsetting Chloe; and though he normally would have been happy about this, especially since this was far from the first time that little brat had gone tattling to anyone about things that were none of her business, he couldn’t help feeling a little guilty for how mean he and the others had been to her.

Jack got up, turned out the light, and made sure to grab a few tissues from the box on his desk while following his familiar path through the dark back to his bed. For all its awkwardness at the time and the embarrassment he’d suffered for it in the end, the experience of kissing with Elisa had been even more of a turn-on than he’d imagined it could be. Tonight, remembering that experience while imagining what more he could do with her would likewise take his fantasies about her to greater heights than his imagination alone ever had.

The next day was a very important day for the Williams and Williamson families, almost as important as the big day that was to follow. Francis and Megan had each discussed the details of what they were planning to tell their husbands and each of their children while they’d been working on Chloe’s new bedroom the day before, but they both understood that they were merely making sure their explanations to their children wouldn’t clash with each other and thereby lead to any unfortunate misunderstandings. There was no perfect script they could follow that could anticipate every way anyone might react and every question they might be asked in response.

Talking to their husbands proved to be the easiest task for both mothers: their objective for each husband was to inform him about the big sleepover they had planned for celebrating Chloe’s birthday without telling him anything about the unusual sleeping arrangements they had devised for the children in hopes of encouraging them to engage in some potentially pleasurable but also highly illegal activities with each other that might produce a new addition or two to each family. Jim, ever the inattentive workaholic, merely wanted to know whether he and Megan would be sleeping over with the Williams family as well—and if so, whether he should bring his laptop so he wouldn’t miss any important messages from his boss; she informed him that no, they weren’t going to be staying the evening themselves, but he ought to clear his schedule for that evening anyway because she was planning to have a private little “party” for just the two of them once they got home from the main event. Joe’s natural curiosity proved a bit more difficult to satisfy, as it was his house where all these extra guests were going to be staying, but Francis had all the answers she needed: that the sleepover would be much like the others when they’d hosted either of the Williamson children, except this time they’d be hosting both; and that since she and he were going to be having a second more intimate “celebration” together after the boys and girls were all tucked in, she’d be sure to tell Jack to warn Dan (chief disturber of the peace during previous sleepovers) that he’d better pipe down if he didn’t want to wear out his welcome.

For Megan, explaining the big plan for tomorrow to Dan proved a little bit more difficult, though she had the advantage of having told him to expect this discussion. In addition to having to swear her son to secrecy about what she was telling him, she had to keep from sounding too much like a hypocrite when taking back some of what she’d told him back when she was trying to keep him from acting out his fantasies about Clara for real in order to maintain her credibility when explaining why she was now encouraging him to do so. “The whole world’s been through some pretty drastic changes since then,” was what she ended up saying, “and things are different now—for us, and for everyone else. If anybody in our families is going to have any babies for us now, it’s going to have to be you and and Jack with each other’s sisters, and it’s going to have to be soon. It’s already getting hard to find a high school girl out there who can have a baby if she isn’t having one already, and if Francis and I are right—though I desperately hope we’re not—it might not be that much longer before even Clara and Elisa won’t be able to either.”

Dan’s eyes were the widest Megan had ever seen them. “Mom, are you serious?”

“Son, I don’t think I’ve ever been more serious about anything in my life. In a way, you know, I’m kinda glad you and Clara have gotten as far as you have with each other; and I’m glad your friend Jack is getting along with your sister that way too. It usually takes longer for kids to get over being grossed out by that kind of thing.”

Dan’s eyes narrowed with uncertainty. “Do you really think that means Clara will... let me do that to her?”

“Oh, trust me: when the time comes, she’ll be with you on this all the way; but you really shouldn’t think of it as something you’ll be doing _to_ her so much as something she’ll be doing _with_ you. It’ll be a lot like kissing, just with your parts instead of your mouths. See?”

“Funny... when you put it that way, I kinda get to thinking maybe putting a baby in a girl isn’t quite as gross as kissing. I mean, it’s not like you’re getting spit all over each other like when you’re kissing. When the baby batter goes in, it’s gonna _stay_ in, right?”

“Uh...” Megan then had to explain a few things to Dan about some of the messier aspects of sex that the books and online articles he and Jack had researched had evidently neglected to mention. “...although it will help if she holds her hips up for a while afterward,” she concluded. “Also, it might be a good idea to have some tissues with you or keep one of her pads nearby to help clean her up, especially if she does any bleeding.”

“Ugh... maybe it really is grosser than kissing after all,” said Dan. “That’s not really what I’d thought it would be like at all. On the other hand, at least none of that stuff will be getting into our mouths.”

While Megan had already decided not to tell her son anything more to disgust him, as she was already seriously risking turning him off to sex again, his last blissfully innocent remark did remind her of something else important to discuss: “By the way, I should probably mention I’ll be packing some lubricant in your overnight bag; just in case—you know—she doesn’t produce enough of her own. You should probably use some from the start anyway just to be on the safe side.”

“Uh, thanks, Mom... I think.” Dan was learning all kinds of decidedly unromantic things about sex and reproduction today, but his mother’s implicit assurance that Clara would bear with him through her disgust at the baby-making act—just as he had borne with her through his disgust at the act of kissing—kept him wanting to try it anyway. Doing a lot more of everything he had been doing with his little girlfriend so far, his mother explained, was the way to proceed; but as gently and tenderly as possible, particularly once their clothes were off and they were working their way up to the grand finale. It would work best, she concluded, when it was truly an act of love: when he started thinking more of the girl and what she wanted than of himself.

For Francis, explaining the big plan for tomorrow to Jack also proved rather challenging; especially since he was not at all happy when she came into his room saying they needed to have a little chat, as he thought this a rather rude surprise after her holding her tongue about the whole embarrassing incident yesterday had gotten him thinking he was safe from having to have any “little chat” with her. When she began to talk about Chloe’s big birthday party tomorrow and how the entire Williamson family would be there to celebrate with them and then Dan and Elisa were going to be staying for a sleepover afterward, however, Jack immediately started giving her a much friendlier reception. “Thing is,” she concluded in a low conspiratorial tone, “y’all won’t be going to bed until your papa and I do; and then instead of the way y’all usually do these things, your little gal pal Elisa’s gonna be sleeping in your room with you, and Dan’s gonna spend the night with Clara in her room. Now, that last part ain’t nothing your papa needs to know about, you get what I’m saying?”

“Loud and clear, Ma... but... are you telling me...?”

“Yeah. What y’all were doing yesterday, y’all are gonna be doing again; and then some.”

“You mean...?”

“Exactly what I sound like I mean. You’re gonna do Mrs. Williamson a favor by doing everything you always wanted to do with Elisa, and your buddy Dan’s gonna return the favor to me with your baby sister Clara.”

“You and Dan’s ma want us to breed each other’s baby sisters?”

“Shhh! Pipe down, boy! I’m pretty sure your papa’s in his man cave right now, but I know Chloe can’t be far outta earshot.”

“Sorry, Ma.”

“So, you got any objections to knocking up your dream girl? I know you’ve taken quite a shine to Elisa; pretty hard to miss, the way you two were chewing each other’s faces yesterday.”

“Aw, Ma, that was just—”

“Just you with your hands all over her kissing up a storm, and it sure weren’t looking like she minded at all.”

“Well... yeah.”

“So again, got any reasons why you wouldn’t wanna take her maidenhead and give your baby to her?”

“Maidenhead? What’s that?”

“Did I forget to tell you?” Francis proceeded to explain to her son some of the very same things Megan happened to be explaining to hers at the moment about the hymen and the ways it could complicate the act of taking a girl’s virginity and make it a bit messy. “That’s some of why Meg and me’s been trying to get y’all—and your gal pal especially—to get out and around the last few days, and why I’ve been pushing Clara in particular to learn to ride that bike already. It might make things a bit easier for ’em tomorrow.”

Jack had the look on his face of a boy in a candy store who’d just been told he could take whatever he wanted for free, but was starting to think there had to be some catch to this offer. “Ma, you really mean this? You’re wanting me to get with Elisa tomorrow night and stick it in her like our stud when he’s whelping a new litter?”

“Well, it ain’t all as down and dirty as you’re making it sound! I told ya, Jack: we’re not animals, with boys like you waiting for a girl to come into her season so you can jump up on her back and go to town on her like a horsey. For one thing, it’s an act of love for us: we don’t do it because we gotta, but because we wanna. For another, in just about all animals, the guy’s gotta climb onto the gal from behind because it’s dangerous out there and they always gotta keep their eyes out for trouble and be ready to break it up on a moment’s notice. What puts us a cut above them is, we don’t gotta do that; we got shelter and warmth and places to go where no one’s gonna bother us, which is why in these civilized parts, we typically go face to face so we can look into each other’s eyes when we do it like you and Elisa when you did all that kissing yesterday.”

Jack blinked at having all this information dumped on him at once, but could only think to say in response: “I never thought of it that way before, Ma.” In all his fantasies about Elisa, he had always thought about taking her from the front, even though for the last several weeks she had always sat beside him on a couch or bed or on his lap with her back to him whenever they got to snuggling. Her turning around and putting her face in his for all that kissing was because of what she’d spotted Dan and Clara doing and decided to try with him; though he couldn’t deny he felt incredibly good all over having her arms around his neck, her chest pressed up against his own, and her eyes fluttering open to look up into his from time to time while she was locking lips with him.

“Well, start thinking about it that way now, because that’s what we want you to do again; only this time with you two alone with each other, and your clothes off, and the door locked so no one comes busting in on you. You’ll want to take it slow and easy with her, since it’s probably gonna hurt a little for her at first.” Francis now launched into a further little lecture about what to expect. If this had been one of the many other lectures she’d given Jack before, it would normally have gone in one ear and out the other without registering in the gray matter between; but for this one on his new favorite subject, he hung on every word she said with rapt attention. “...and that’s why they called it the missionary position, though I think even most of them missionary men was letting their wives be on top sometimes,” she concluded. “It might be good for keeping her from leaking out on the bed, especially if you slip a pillow under her backside when you’re done, but seems to me you can’t get in as close with her without being in danger of crushing her. You might could do better to do it sitting up like with the kissing, or let her be on top since she’s smaller.”

Jack had some ideas of his own on how he’d keep lovely little Elisa from making any messes on his bed while he was pumping her full of his baby batter, based on some of his earlier fantasies about her, but he didn’t think his ma really needed to know about them. So he asked her instead about one little thing she’d mentioned earlier that was still nagging him: “Say, Ma, ain’t there some way to make sure it won’t hurt too much? You wouldn’t want Pa hearing her crying out, would ya? And tears and screams ain’t my idea of a good time for neither of us.”

For a moment, Francis seemed to be staring into some distant place further away than any of the four walls around her in Jack’s room, but then she focused on her son again and replied “It ain’t gonna hurt that much, I reckon; at least, it wasn’t so bad for me that first time... Well, maybe a little, but I was still in a bad way from the last time I’d been on the rag back then anyway...”

Jack made a little gagging noise that doesn’t translate very well into print, and said “Ma, I did not need to know that.”

“Like your pa likes to say, suck it up, Jack. You’re the one who asked about it. Honestly, though, losing the maidenhead weren’t so bad: mostly, it was like peeling away a scab from my skinned knee maybe before I should really ought to have; painful and kinda bloody, but it didn’t hurt so long as I didn’t move around too much. Can’t say if it’ll be the same for Elisa, but I can tell you this: everything hurts less if she’s wet enough that she don’t take much friction from you going in. In case she ain’t, though, I’ve got a kind of lubricant folks usually put on their rubbers to keep them from breaking—water-based, so it ain’t greasy like sunscreen. I’ll leave a tube of it in your bathroom in your drawer next to the sink; a little dab of that on you, and maybe one more for her, and you’ll both be wet enough for anything.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jack said; and for more reasons than one, he thought but didn’t say.

“Fact, now that I think of it, you probably should put some on first thing anyway; until you and she figure each other out, you can’t be too careful,” Francis added.

“I will, Ma.”

“Now, one last thing: though the main surprise tomorrow is for Chloe, these babies we’re wanting you and your buddy to make in each other’s baby sisters are meant to be surprises for your papa and his. That’s why y’all making them is a favor to us: if we had our druthers, we’d have made ’em ourselves, but turns out that was not to be.” She finished by explaining that since these babies were meant to be a complete surprise, if she caught either boy spoiling it by making out with his girl where either of their fathers could see him, she’d have no choice but to smack them both for their misbehavior. “So keep yourself and your buddy Dan out of trouble, ya hear?”

Francis and Megan’s final respective stops on their explanation tour were to discuss these reproduction-by-proxy plans with Clara and Elisa. These conversations proved much easier in some ways than their discussions with their sons, since they understood their daughters’ feminine ways better from personal experience than they could ever grasp their sons’ budding masculinity. In other ways, however, their daughters being so painfully young for this great undertaking of a crucial task previously reserved for full-grown women—or at least older adolescent girls—made putting their explanations in terms they could understand an emotionally grueling ordeal.

For Francis, getting Clara somewhere away from Chloe’s sharp ears so they could talk freely proved to be an extra challenge. She waited until after she’d put the little kindergartner to bed (an hour before her big sister’s bedtime, which in turn was an hour before their big brother’s bedtime as a demonstration to all three children of the privileges of maturity) to “remember” that she had some educational materials to pick up from their school for next month’s classes (which in fact she did, though she could easily have left them there another week) and “invite” the girl along on the drive (while giving her a stern look to warn her she’d better accept the invitation). She also cooked up an excuse for the long delay in their getting home afterward, though it turned out Jack and Joe had already turned in by then and she didn’t have to use it.

All the way to the school, Francis told her how Chloe’s surprise birthday gift was going to be a gift to her as well: Clara would get to have the whole room they had previously shared all to herself once her baby sister had her own room. On the way back from school (it having taken no more than five minutes to pick up the new materials), she then proceeded to tell her about the plan to have the Williamson children stay the night for another sleepover like they’d had before, only with Dan staying with her in her bedroom and Elisa spending the night in her brother Jack’s this time. As the full implications of this arrangement began to sink into the little girl’s mind, her mother pulled over at an isolated stretch of the road to discuss this more before going home.

As with Jack, Francis had little trouble convincing Clara to go along with the plan to have Dan spend the evening alone with her in her bedroom taking their amorous activities with each other to the next level to make a baby in her. Selling her on the idea that her father should be kept in the dark about this because her barren mother wanted to be able to present the resulting baby to him later on as that surprise addition to the family he’d always wanted was fairly easy too. Somewhat more difficult was warning her about some of the ways losing her virginity might get rather messy and painful while convincing her the final result would still be worth the trouble.

What helped convince Clara of this in the end was when her mama told her that while the baby was growing inside her, she would not be going back on the rag for up to nine months; at eight years old, three quarters of a year free from monthly mood swings and crabbiness and fits of temper in general seemed by her reckoning to be like a blissfully carefree time lasting nearly forever. At the same time, Dan would continue to be allowed to hold and kiss and pleasure her; and when—like all good things—that time eventually came to an end, she would have a baby to present as her gift to her entire loving family. Francis felt a little guilty about deliberately leaving out of this beautiful narrative any mention of any of the numerous potentially more terrible and tragic consequences her daughter’s precocious motherhood might bring to the family in the long run, but if and when any such consequences occurred, she soothed her conscience by vowing she would shield her daughter and the rest of her family from as many of them as she could by taking them on herself.

At roughly this same time, Megan was in her daughter’s bedroom quietly spinning a very similar narrative for her. While Jack certainly would not make a very good daddy for the baby, she freely admitted, he wouldn’t have to: the baby was to be Elisa’s little surprise gift to her own daddy as a favor to her mommy who couldn’t make babies with him anymore, and the resulting little baby boy or girl they would adopt as their own to raise as her little brother or sister. She quite certainly would not have to endure those painful cramps for year upon seemingly endless year, and for up to nine months, she wouldn’t be doing any of that tiresome bleeding for which she had to wear those pads that made her feel a little like she was back in diapers.

Of course, after how much Elisa had enjoyed kissing with Jack the previous day, she was almost ecstatic to learn she was going to be allowed to do it again tomorrow... and something more. She was a little more apprehensive at the thought of taking a body part of his deep into one of her own as her mommy had described the act to her back when explaining the facts of life in response to her questions about why she’d begun bleeding at her desk in school all those months ago; but—as her mommy was telling her now—if she could get to liking something as gross as pressing her open mouth against a boy’s open mouth had seemed to be, how did she know she wouldn’t also come to like having a part of that same boy packed into that opening between her legs? Imagining what that might be like was a little unsettling, but she also found it fascinating and just a little bit thrilling to contemplate too.

Megan did also make sure to warn her daughter about the possible pain and bleeding she might experience: it would probably be something like that time when Elisa got her ears pierced, she explained, based on her own experience with losing her virginity. To be on the safe side, she should be sure to tell Jack to proceed slowly and be gentle with her for this first time; and her mother would also be packing some lubricant in her overnight bag for her to use just in case he forgot to have any on hand for the occasion. In case of any bleeding, she would also be packing some tissues and one of her reusable pads to be used (she hoped) for only this one last time.

In fact, Megan quietly hoped the vigorous exercising she had been encouraging Elisa to do this past month had worn down her hymen and strengthened her vaginal muscles to the point that her daughter would do no bleeding and experience no pain at all, but she couldn’t be sure of this without taking an awfully intrusive look inside her daughter’s most intimate parts; and this she was simply not willing to do. Like Francis, she did not tell her daughter anything about the discomforts of pregnancy and the pains of childbirth, as she did not want to discourage her from wanting to have a baby. Also like her friend, she carefully avoided saying anything about how illegal all these amorous activities at such young ages were and all the social consequences the whole family might suffer from all the laws she and her children were breaking, determined to leave them their ignorance as a defense while she bore the full brunt of those consequences for herself if and when their crimes were exposed.


	8. Crescendo

The big day had finally arrived, and the party Francis and Megan had arranged for it was about as grand as a little kindergartner’s birthday party on a school day could possibly be. Chloe had always liked ponies, horses, unicorns, and everything else equine-related, so her mother had naturally gotten the idea to take everyone out for some horseback riding at a nearby ranch after school. While it turned out their birthday girl was actually more enamored of looking at equine animals than riding them (as she soon got bored of “just sitting here” in her pony’s saddle), they all had a pretty good time; those who had some horseback riding skills (such as Joe and Francis and their son Jack) enjoyed teaching those who didn’t (pretty much everyone else) a few basics, and everyone had a few laughs watching Dan’s learning experience in particular as he seemed to forget several times he was riding a horse rather than driving an ATV.

It was suppertime when they got back from the ranch, so the mothers now brought out a number of dishes they’d prepared for the occasion which (of course) included every one of what they knew to be the birthday girl’s favorites. Afterward came dessert, for which in addition to the “Twinkie” cake (yellow cake with a middle layer composed of gloriously calorific and fattening pastry cream) Francis had made as the birthday cake, Megan had also made a full batch of eclairs which were so delicious (and also calorific and fattening) that to ensure they all would have room in their stomachs for it, she dared not bring them out until after Chloe blew the candles out and the cake was served; and even then, she limited the number each child was allowed to have to two, having learned from experience that children wouldn’t notice their stomachs were full and would therefore soon eat themselves sick if allowed to have as many as they wanted. After this, of course, came the time for opening the presents.

At their mothers’ recommendation (and using their mothers’ money), Clara and Elisa had each respectively gotten her a full collection of _My Little Pony_ dolls from the original toy line and from the newer line based on the _Friendship is Magic_ show. Dan had used the money his mother gave him to buy Chloe a horse-themed Lego kit, and Jack (who was usually a bit of a cheapskate) had used his own allowance to buy her a unicorn-themed coloring book and some markers. As for the parents, Francis and Joe had each bought her some clothing (a dress, a shirt, a pair of overalls, some socks, pajamas, and a couple pairs of underwear) printed or embroidered with unicorns, while Jim and Megan (at her recommendation while using his money) had gotten her several pieces of equine-themed jewelry: a necklace, a charm bracelet, and a pair of clip-on earrings (since her ears weren’t pierced).

Chloe was quite delighted with each of these gifts, and could hardly wait to try on all the clothes and jewelry in particular. Before she could do so, however, Francis now topped off the evening by announcing she and Joe had one final birthday gift to give and sending him to go get the key for it from where they had been hiding it. Then everyone accompanied the birthday girl to that one door the grownups had been keeping locked for the past several weeks and watched as her father handed her the key to unlock it. After she spent a few moments fumbling with the lock (because it was a bit stiff and her hand-eye coordination wasn’t the best at her age), the door sprang open to reveal what her parents now announced to be her new bedroom.

It had been repainted and had a new carpet, a big new bed with a _My Little Pony_ -themed pillow and blankets on it had been installed where her crib (which had been discreetly removed and stashed away in the attic) had once stood, and a pair of posters with lavishly detailed prints of a unicorn on the one and a pegasus on the other hung from the walls. The closet over in one corner also had an old dresser which Joe had repainted to look good as new standing in it which, Francis informed them, now also belonged to their birthday girl along with everything else in the room. Chloe was almost ecstatic with delight at hearing all of this now belonged to her, though her father telling her she must now join everyone else in helping move all her stuff from what was now exclusively Clara’s bedroom to this one helped take a bit of the edge off her excitement.

With everyone pitching in, however, the move didn’t take very long; and Clara was also delighted not only at having her bedroom exclusively to herself, but also because everyone had helped clean up the mess in her room (for which she and her baby sister both bore some of the blame) while moving her sister’s stuff out, so she didn’t have to do it herself. Afterward, Chloe proceeded to try on and show off her new clothes and jewelry to everyone, and they all agreed (albeit with varying levels of enthusiasm and sincerity) that she looked adorable in them. After that, they broke out some board games and wound down the rest of the evening with the parents playing _Monopoly_ and their children playing _Life_.

Around eight o’clock, after finishing their game (with Joe winning a most ruthless and crushing victory over them all, starting with driving his own wife Francis to bankruptcy, no less), Jim and Megan thanked their friends for the good time and made their farewells for the evening. This would normally have been Chloe’s bedtime as well, but since she was the birthday girl and the other children were having such a good time playing with her that they all supported her pleas to let her stay up a little longer, her parents relented and told their children all three of them would be allowed to stay up an extra hour past their usual bedtimes. At nine o’clock, when she finally did have to go bed, her father preempted her complaining by announcing with a big yawn (which he didn’t have to fake, though he was nowhere near so weary as he was pretending) that this had been a long day and he was tired and so he was also going to be turning in now.

About half an hour later, shortly after tucking Chloe into her new bed and reading her a bedtime story (which hadn’t helped her get to sleep at all; she was still too excited from admiring her new bedroom), Francis also casually announced she was going to be turning in as well and that she trusted them all to brush their teeth and get themselves to bed on time. As she shuffled off down the hall to join her husband, Jack and Clara both knew to wait with bated breath until they heard the click of the lock on their folks’ bedroom door that told them neither one would be seen outside their bedroom again until morning. When they heard it, brother and sister gave each other a knowing nod and then promptly switched seats, putting her next to Dan and him next to Elisa; then each of the girls promptly climbed up into her boy’s lap and warm embrace.

Though Clara suggested they should just quit their game right then and there (partially because she was so eager to get to bed and partially because she was having terrible luck with this round of the game and had every reason to expect it was going to end with her coming in dead last), Dan proposed they finish it instead with a slight twist: with each girl being “married” to her boy in the game (meaning the peg representing her would be moved to his car token) and merging her assets and debts with his so the two players became one. Elisa and Jack thought this a rather clever and romantic idea, and combining the girls’ fortunes with the boys’ this way left the two merged players with a roughly equal chance of winning, so they agreed. Seeing she was outnumbered, Clara reluctantly agreed as well, on condition that Dan took over making all the decisions and kept one arm wrapped around her at all times as he finished the game; whereupon Elisa immediately made the same deal with Jack.

When they finally reached the end of the game a little later (with much caressing and cuddling and stroking between turns), both couples ended up retiring in style, but Dan and Clara came out just slightly ahead of Jack and Elisa in the final tally of their net worth. The boys shook hands (with their free arms) and declared “Good game.” Then each couple agreed it was bedtime.

Much as they had genuinely enjoyed all the day’s diversions, the boys and girls had also been in suspense all day long, anticipating its ending with a strange mixture of eagerness and anxiety. All day long, for their fathers’ sakes, they’d had to keep their hands off of each other and exchange meaningful looks and words with their preferred partners only where they were absolutely certain neither the men nor little Chloe (still a bit of a tattletale, after all) would see or hear or notice them. Each boy and girl had also had only brief opportunities scattered throughout the day to compare notes verbally with his and her best friend while out of their fathers’ (and snitchy baby sister’s) earshot and make sure they were all on the same page about their plans for later this evening.

Now the hour was upon them, and each boy and girl’s combined anticipation and anxiety was rising to a fever pitch within, giving him and her a thrill of fearsome excitement. As usual, they still had to honor their word to their parents by brushing their teeth and changing into their pajamas before they went to bed, but there was only one bathroom for them to use for this unless they wanted to take their chances with the half-bath in one of the darker and dustier corners of the “man cave” down in the basement (which they did not) or try to persuade Francis and Joe to let them into the somewhat nicer full bathroom attached to their master bedroom (which would surely be an exercise in futility). Jack had a fairly equitable solution: “Well, Dan—and Clara—to the victor goes the spoils,” he said, motioning them toward the bathroom door with his free arm (his other was still wrapped around Elisa).

Dan nodded and then turned to Clara. “Ladies first,” he said, giving her a little peck on the cheek to make leaving his arm’s embrace a little easier for her. Clara immediately turned and stole back a quick kiss on the lips before bolting into the bathroom to get ready for bed. As she was hastening her way through this ritual (a bit too sloppily to get her teeth properly brushed, though she at least scrubbed them a little in her frenzy), Dan went back to the living room to get his pajamas and overnight bag from where he’d left them.

Once she was done, she rushed from the bathroom to her bedroom to change into her pajamas while Dan took his turn brushing his teeth. While he was in there, he also used this bit of privacy to change into his own pajamas. Emerging with his clothes in one arm and his overnight bag swinging from the other, he winked and motioned silently to Jack and Elisa that it was their turn before quietly opening the door into Clara’s bedroom, slipping in, and then carefully easing it shut behind him.

Remembering what Dan had done and thinking it rather classy in a way, Jack leaned over and gave Elisa a peck on the cheek the same way and said “Well, you heard him. Ladies first.”

Remembering how Clara had responded and thinking it a rather nice thing to do, Elisa got up on her tiptoes to give him a quick smooch on the lips before going to get her own pajamas and overnight bag from where she’d left them in the living room. “Thanks, but I can wait,” she said. When she got back, however, he hadn’t moved an inch.

“I said, ladies first,” he insisted.

Shrugging, Elisa accepted his offer and went first after all. While she was getting just as excited as Clara had been before her, she was still more meticulous at brushing her teeth. In her haste to get to bed, however, she forgot about putting on her pajamas until she was out the door and Jack had gone in to take his turn. Quietly laying her overnight bag on his bed in his room, she went back and waited patiently at the door for him to finish. “I forgot my PJs,” she muttered in embarrassment when he was finished and finally opened the door.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Jack said very softly, and then he dropped his voice down to a whisper. “Come on in. I’ve got an idea.”

Elisa hesitated for a moment, but when she saw the roguish smirk on Jack’s face and the intriguing gleam in his eye, she went in.


	9. Multi-Climax

Dan was mildly perturbed to discover, when trying to lock the door to Clara’s bedroom, that it didn’t have any lock; not even the buttonless and keyless kind you locked by pushing and turning the doorknob itself—the kind he remembered so many of the doors having on them in his family’s old house in Minnesota. “This door’s got no lock,” he grumbled, mostly to himself.

“Nope. Mama never let us have one,” Clara said. “Come on over here, Dan. Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s coming in here anyway.”

Dan wasn’t so confident of her claim as she was, but he didn’t want to keep his beloved little Clara waiting. Stepping on over to the lower bunk of the bed where she sat waiting for him, he sat down and slid her up onto his lap as he had so many times before. Likewise, as she had so many times before, she grabbed each of his wrists and pulled them around to wrap herself firmly in his arms while he rested his chin on her shoulder.

There they sat in the lower bunk that had—until today—been Chloe’s (Clara had gotten the top bunk because she was older) and necked for a while as they had so many times before... only not exactly the way they had before. Unlike the trousers Dan usually wore and the denim or corduroy overalls she’d usually been wearing for the past few months (because Winter was cold; she typically wore shorts or skirts in warmer seasons), the fabric of their flannel pajamas was softer and thinner and a lot more fluid. While the coarseness and stiffness and thickness of their regular clothes hadn’t entirely kept her from noticing the way his lap tended to swell beneath her whenever her cuddles and giggles and wiggles were making him hot for her (literally: she could feel the warmth from his body increasing to almost uncomfortable levels when he was holding her close like this), she had never felt the narrowness and softly conical shape of that swelling so clearly as she was feeling it right now as it poked and rubbed up against the sensitive folds of the narrow little slit and those two fleshy little flaps lining it on either side that she had down there.

Thanks to her mama’s answering a few questions, Clara now knew that Dan’s private part poking up against her was called his penis and what it was poking was the entrance to what was called her vagina. How she hadn’t realized the obvious way these parts fit together much sooner seemed almost inexplicable to her now: she’d seen penises on boy dogs and goats and vaginas on girl dogs and goats and even seen their babies—puppies and kids—being born from their vaginas a couple times, yet she hadn’t made the obvious connection as to how those babies ever got into those girl animals in the first place. If she had, it wouldn’t have taken her much time to figure out humans made their babies pretty much the same way.

At last Clara understood in her thoughts what her body and Dan’s had been telling her all along: that his penis was swelling up the way it was because it wanted to go into her vagina and make a baby in her— _he_ wanted to put it in her and make _his_ baby in her—and likewise she and her vagina wanted to let him put it in and make that baby. His penis wasn’t the only part swelling up with anticipation either: she could feel those folds around her vaginal opening—the labia, she seemed to recall her mama had called those—swelling too, albeit more outward and to either side than upward. Remembering a similar sensation from that last time they’d been cuddling like this when she’d started kissing him, she wriggled around in his embrace until he loosened his arms, and then turned herself around on his lap with his part still firmly pressed against hers through those four thin layers of cloth—a move that made him groan softly as she felt the press of his firmness against hers get even firmer and press even harder; or was that just the firmness of her own swelling pressing back harder against his as it was swelling out even more?

Feeling the swelling of Clara’s lips pressing themselves against his own as she ground her hidden little mound against his hidden lower head sent waves of pleasure mixed with heat rolling over seemingly every inch of Dan’s flesh. Already the feel of her body against his was so good, and this before very much of his skin and hers was even touching! When she pulled back from kissing him for a moment to catch her breath and loosened her arms from around his neck, he suddenly released her from his own embrace to grab two fistfuls of the sides of her pajama top underneath her ribs in his hands and start rolling it up over her head.

Confused at Dan’s sudden maneuver, Clara resisted for a moment until she realized what he was doing, and then raised her arms to allow the sleeves to peel off inside out as well. As soon as her top was off, he tossed it aside and then began peeling at his own pajama top the same way. With a little help from her, he was soon rid of that too, and now the two little lovers kissed and threw their arms around each other and pressed their bare chests back together and reveled in each other’s naked warmth.

Klahn had crafted his precocity virus with meticulous attention to certain details about its effects on various different aspects of a girl’s sexual maturity that mattered only to him. Though generally enamored of the old historical record of the world’s youngest mother Lina Medina, one aspect of the story he’d always rather disliked was the mention that not only had she begun to menstruate while she was still just a toddler, but she had also begun to grow a full pair of breasts and pubic hair by the time she was four; which he thought looked rather ugly on a little girl of any age, but especially one so young. As such, he had formulated his virus to avoid accelerating the development of these secondary sexual characteristics so far as was possible; these secondary characteristics would still inevitably develop eventually, but he hoped with his careful tweaking they would do so only years later when the girl was nearing her premature menopause.

As a result, Clara’s breast buds—which normally should have started expanding out some two years before she went on her first rag—were all but nonexistent: these two lumps of adipose tissue floating around beneath the nipples on her otherwise completely flat chest were so tiny, neither she nor anyone else had even noticed them rolling around in there. Dan certainly didn’t notice them now as she squished those little nipples up against his ribs. Neither did he particularly care that she didn’t have any breasts: that many boys based their rating of a girl’s sexual attractiveness on the size of her mammaries had not been a memorable part of his sexual education—or hers, for that matter.

Nevertheless, as he and Clara continued sloppily kissing each other open-mouthed all over each other’s cheeks and chins and mouths, Dan did rather instinctively begin groping around for those little nipples with his hands until he found them, and then planted a trail of kisses down around her throat and each nape of her neck before going even lower and giving each nipple a number of tugs with his lips. While somewhat pleasant, this mostly only felt kinda weird to her, and he stopped kissing her there when he heard her giggle and ask him what he was trying to do. Shrugging in response, he kissed his way back up to her mouth as she continued to squirm in his lap and try caressing his shoulder blades with her hands (which gave him about as much pleasure as his playing with her nipples had given her).

Eventually, as Clara began developing a rhythm for bumping her swollen labia against his swollen glans to maximize the pleasure these collisions were bringing to her, Dan realized he wanted to see her completely naked and touch the rest of her lovely little eight-year-old body to the rest of his own. Carefully rising to his feet while trying to keep his mouth covering hers and sliding the bulge of her tightly wrapped bulging cleft down the outer edge of his equally tightly wrapped bulging rod, he gently set her down on her bare feet and started slipping the backs of his hands beneath the waistbands of her underwear and pair of pajama bottoms to peel them down. Quickly realizing what he was doing, she helped him slide them down her thighs and knees until gravity dragged them the rest of the way down, and then hooked her little fingers under either side of his pajama bottoms’ and underwear’s elastic waistbands to return the favor.

There in the soft warm glow of the table lamp perched up on his little girlfriend’s dresser, he beheld the first live set of “lady parts” he had ever seen in living memory. (He’d actually seen one on a few occasions when his mother had taken a few baths with him back while he was still a toddler, but that didn’t count since he didn’t remember any of those.) Just as Clara’s breast buds were effectively invisible, every hair on her body other than the ones on her head was a short and fine translucent strand so small no one could see it without looking very closely. In contrast, though nearly all of Dan’s body was likewise devoid of any visible pubic hair, a couple of strands on his pubic mound were just beginning to lengthen and darken enough to be spotted if anyone was paying attention.

Clara wasn’t, however, since she was also getting her first chance to look at a live set of “manly parts” since that almost-forgotten time she’d caught her papa coming out of the shower in the master bedroom when she was four. (This incident was what had finally convinced him he needed to quit putting off buying that lock he’d been meaning to install on that bedroom’s door.) Dan was indeed much less hairy than her papa (except for the mop of hair on his head), but what had her attention was just how enormous his manly member was—to her; it was actually only about four inches long, but that was more than enough in her eyes. Intrigued, she reached out to touch this thing that had been making her feel so good rubbing her through their clothes.

As Clara first brushed the tips of her dainty little fingers against the sensitive stretch of skin just beneath the head of his penis, and then wrapped her whole hand around the shaft as she might around an old-fashioned joystick, Dan saw and felt the head bulge even more and the shaft stiffen even harder. The burst of pleasure from the softness of her touch made him spasm slightly and almost lose his footing; but then he looked again at that bald little cleft down there between her thighs, and focused on reaching his own hand out to touch those bulging little folds of flesh that had felt so good bumping and sliding against his head and shaft through all those thin layers of cotton and flannel. Feeling a sudden wetness dripping onto the tips of his fingers, he thought for a brief moment she might have lost control of her bladder; but then he remembered that thing his mom had said about packing him some lubricant “just in case—you know—she doesn’t produce enough of her own,” and realized this fluid was the lubricant his lovely little sweetheart was producing on her own from that cute little slit of hers in response to the pleasure and passion his touch was bringing to her: she was wetting herself, all right, but not with urine.

Clara also thought for a briefly embarrassing moment that she might have lost control and taken a leak on her lover, but when—rather than pull away in anger and disgust and revulsion— he actually pressed her wetness on his fingers back into her weeping slit and began spreading the liquid around on those little flaps on either side like a butter knife spreading butter on toast, she quickly realized her mistake. Of course, for all her haste in her excitement, she’d made sure to take a leak earlier when she was in the bathroom getting ready for bed; and she certainly hadn’t felt herself releasing now the way she had then, and every other time she’d used the toilet for that matter. Also, a few half-remembered experiences from when she’d been a toddler just learning what ought and ought not to disgust her told her that the yellow “pee” or “urine” stuff (as people called it) she made when taking a leak wasn’t like this stuff she was making now: it wasn’t slick and didn’t make things slippery the way it was doing to both Dan’s fingers and the places he was slathering it on her around her opening.

Noticing how Clara’s fingers around his fleshly pole were making him feel so good that he was already producing a few milky drops from the tiny hole on the tip of its bulbous head—the way he’d so often done before while fantasizing about this day—Dan realized he’d better do something to distract her: every time that early bit of baby batter had begun dribbling from him like that before, it had been because his stroking was driving him past the point of no return, and he was about to start spurting out all the rest of that stuff he’d felt building up behind it. If she could do some of the same things to him with the touch of her fingers as he’d done to himself before with his own, couldn’t he maybe do something to push her closer to her own point of no return? Feeling how smoothly his fingers glided over the slippery surfaces everywhere he’d spread the wetness of her lubrication, he got the idea that if having her fingers curled around his shaft a bit like he was hoping the walls of her vagina would soon be was getting him so excited, maybe thrusting his own fingers inside her and rubbing them up against those inner walls the way he was hoping his penis would soon be doing would excite her the same way.

Clara moaned as Dan dipped first his middle finger, then his pointer too, and then his ring finger into her vagina as well and wiggled them around inside her. The good feelings from this were not as intense as the ones she’d gotten from his strokes around her outer parts—except at moments when his fingers happened to squirm up against a little kind of fleshly hood up around the top of her slit as they were spreading it—but they brought her a certain kind of satisfaction, as if they were somehow taking care of a need she’d never previously realized she had to have something entering and filling up her vagina. As intended, she forgot for a while about squeezing her own fingers around her lover’s increasingly hard and throbbing shaft amid the strange—and yet wonderful—sensations of his fingers twisting around against the fleshly walls of her tunnel as if it were the shaft of a mine and they were the miners digging for gold.

Much as he could tell little Clara appreciated his fingers’ attentions, and as satisfying as it also felt to him to realize how good he was making her feel, Dan couldn’t help noticing how she wasn’t quite as slippery deeper inside: several times, he felt a bit of her inner flesh sticking to the tips of his fingers for a moment and then letting go. “You’re sticky in there,” he said softly.

“Jack said Ma put some stuff in the bathroom for this, in case we needed it,” Clara said. “I’ll go get it.”

“No need. My mom packed some lubricant in my overnight bag. I’ve got it right here.” Dan planted his lips on Clara’s and gave her the longest deepest kiss he could as he withdrew his fingers from her and wrapped his arms around her again. She likewise let go of his rod and threw her arms up around his neck to help him kiss her even harder. Neither wanting to let go, the two naked little lovers awkwardly half-danced and half-staggered their way over to where he’d left that overnight bag on her desk, and then he had to grope around in it blindly with one hand for that little tube of water-based “personal lubricant jelly” since he didn’t want to take his other arm or hand or eyes off the beautiful little body of his beloved just as she didn’t want to take hers off of his.

Though he’d never actually seen nor felt that tube of lubricant before, Dan immediately recognized it by its unusual shape: long and round with a thin wedge on the bottom like a tube of toothpaste, but the round cap on the top was as wide around as the rest of the tube. Only when he had it in hand and needed his other hand to open it did he finally let go and take his eyes off of Clara long enough to have a look at what they were going to be using. Curious, she also took a moment to look at the tube as he unscrewed the cap and squeezed some out on his fingers.

“Why’s it called jelly?” she asked, reading the label. “I sure wouldn’t wanna smear that on my sandwich with peanut butter.”

“Neither would I. It just is, I guess,” Dan speculated, “maybe like that rust-cleaning jelly my dad’s got in our garage; you definitely don’t wanna eat that stuff, since the can’s got big red warning labels all over it telling you not to.” Those labels also warned not to let any of it get on one’s skin too, but he didn’t want Clara to be thinking about that when he was about to spread some of this particular “jelly” on theirs. Reaching down, he pushed a couple of fingers covered in lubricant up into her vagina and wormed them around in her much as he had before, much to her delight.

Dan vaguely remembered his mom having mentioned something about a thing some girls had in there called a “hymen” which would often make losing their virginity—what he and Clara were about to do now, as she’d explained—a bit painful and bloody. Evidently, his beloved was either one of the lucky few born without one, or she’d lost hers early to the wear and tear of her somewhat tomboyish ways—as his mom had said could happen—because he certainly hadn’t found any such thing with his fingers. Unbeknown to him, her parents’ encouraging her to keep up her efforts to learn how to ride the bike they’d given her last Christmas (and—they had made perfectly clear—were not going to be returning for a refund no matter what) had paid off: while she still wasn’t riding without training wheels yet, a spill during one of her attempts to do so had ruptured her hymen; and though she’d done some bleeding, this had been at the tag-end of her period, so she assumed that extra little spot of blood on the pad she was still wearing at the time was just a late arrival held over from that.

When Dan withdrew his fingers and began spreading the remainder of the lubricant over his own shaft, Clara held out her hand under the tube and said “Let me have some.” He obliged, and as he’d happily expected, she proceeded to wrap her fingers around his shaft again and slide them gently but firmly up and down over the head and down to the base just above his scrotum. When he felt she’d covered him thoroughly enough, he encouraged her to put the rest in herself to try getting a little pleasure from her own fingers.

This did feel kinda good to Clara, but when she was done, she just looked up and smiled a bit vaguely and said “It’s better when you do it.”

“Then let’s do this for real,” Dan replied, as he closed the tube and stuffed it back into his overnight bag.

The moment of truth had arrived: if ever little Clara had been having any second thoughts about wanting him to put his baby in her, or if ever Dan had doubted whether doing this with her was such a good idea, the renewed passion with which they practically seemed to be attacking each other now had long driven all such inhibitions from their minds. She was all but jumping into his arms as she repeatedly rose to meet the kisses her lover was showering down on her mouth, her chin, her cheeks—even her nose a few times. He had his arms wrapped tight around his little girlfriend and his mind full of the ravishingly lovely beauty of her naked little body as he half-walked and half-carried her toward the bed, holding her up as long as he could every time her feet left the floor to prolong every kiss as he awkwardly and yet meticulously brought her another step toward their goal.

When at last they made it to the bed, Dan bent his knees halfway down to bring his face level with Clara’s; and when her feet left the floor this time, she spread her thighs and wrapped her legs around his waist so she wouldn’t be landing on the floor again. Were he a bit stronger, he might have tried taking her then and there in this standing position; but as he instinctively knew even without his mom being there to tell him, sex standing up was sure to be difficult in even the best of circumstances, let alone while having to hold his girlfriend up because she would have to be almost a full foot off the floor for her entry to line up with his entrant as they were coupling. Instead, therefore, he pitched over together with her into the lower bunk of her bed.

Sitting up with his knees gathered up behind Clara’s back as she straddled him, Dan slid his hands down under her butt cheeks and gripped them carefully to help guide her slippery little slit down onto the fully engorged head of his bulging boyhood. They broke off kissing for a long moment so they could watch together as her slit and the luscious lower lips on either side of it spread open first into an oval and then into a circle to welcome the driving rounded wedge of his throbbing baby-maker’s swollen head up into the warm and wet recesses of her throbbing baby hole. Then, oh-so-agonizingly and yet oh-so-pleasurably gradually, she slid ever further down into his lap and he ever deeper up into her until her swollen labia were effectively seated on his scrotum.

Looking up at the same moment he did, Clara smiled rapturously as she gazed deep into Dan’s eyes, and he could almost feel his heart melting with euphoria at the sight. They both felt getting this far with each other to be quite a major achievement, and indeed, what they had done was no mean feat: for an eight-year-old little girl to be able to accommodate an eleven-year-old not-quite-so-little boy’s (comparatively) enormous and fully expanded protrusion’s entry into her tight and tiny virgin hole to the full with so few failures and setbacks would have impressed Doctor Klahn immensely, had he known. The deep long hot passionate kiss they planted on each other’s lips after that felt as much like a smooch of victory as of love.

Once Clara and Dan were coupled in this manner, they found moving around very much for either of them to be very difficult, as the tight walls of her vaginal tunnel were clamped down quite firmly on every part of his penile invader inside her. They didn’t mind too much, as neither had ever heard of how couples typically like to move in and out a number of times when making love; but they did instinctively squirm and writhe a little bit back and forth and from side to side in each other’s laps to keep flesh rubbing against flesh and their bulges bulging as they strove to take each other over the top. He could feel the baby batter rising from within as sparkles filled his vision and the buzzing of cicadas filled his ears, while she could feel something deep within her about to burst as more waves of pleasure mixed with warmth washed over her and she felt her head begin to swim as gravity seemed to loose its hold on her and leave her floating free.

It was Clara who passed the point of no return and went over the top first, her eyes rolling back in her head as her whole body shook with ecstasy as she felt whatever had been about to burst within her do so... and then burst again... and then burst a third time. Her vagina clamped down even harder on Dan’s penis, and deep inside—though neither he nor she knew what it was they were feeling—her tiny cervix was contracting against the tip of his glans almost as if to kiss it. With her squeezing him so hard, he actually began to feel a bit of discomfort and also a bit concerned: he didn’t feel like he could take any more tightening.

Nevertheless, when the tightening finally stopped, Dan suddenly felt himself passing the point of no return as he had so many times before in his fantasies. This time, however, it was all for real: his penis almost seemed to be tugging against its captor as he felt a mighty spurt of his baby batter come spraying out of him and deep into his darling little Clara once... twice... thrice... a fourth time, somewhat more weakly... and then one fifth and final squirt of his sperm to chase the others. Her eyes, which she had closed to savor her pleasantly peaceful drift back downward from the exhilarating-but-violent heights she had reached now snapped open in dull confusion as she felt him suddenly packing her even fuller; but then he flashed her his warmest smile, and she remembered these jets of his seminal fluid painting the walls at the end of her little tunnel were what this entire encounter was intended for him to achieve, and she smiled warmly back at him as she looked down once more at the point of their coupling with a pleasant mixture of curiosity and wonderment at what they had just done.

So this was sex, Dan thought, as his stiffness immediately began to soften and his bulging boyhood promptly proceeded to shrink. He was—though he was not familiar with such common vulgar terms—a “grower” rather than a “shower” in the parlance of street slang: his protrusion, long and thick as a roll of quarters when he was using it, now returned to being short and thin as a stack of dimes when he was not. Clara, leaning back against his knees in languid contentment as she contemplated both the pleasures of making a baby she had just experienced and what kind of happiness having that baby might bring her, didn’t complain when he opened his knees and carefully laid her to rest between them on the bed before lying back himself; though not like the frenzied excitement she’d been feeling short minutes ago, the relaxation she was feeling all over every part of her body right now was thoroughly satisfying, leaving her feeling as if all was well with all the world.

While similarly contented in the afterglow of their activity, Dan was also thinking more calmly and practically now as he remembered what his mom had told him about how some of the fluids he’d just pumped up into Clara might come leaking back out; while there wasn’t any blood after all, and—so his mom claimed—the seminal fluids leaking back out wouldn’t decrease the girl’s chances of getting pregnant, he really didn’t want any of them to get on the bed. Hence, he let the head of his flaccid penis remain plugged into her vaginal entrance something like a cork in a wine bottle, and kept her seated on his lap to ensure her hips would remain elevated even as she was lying back. So far, this seemed to be working: nothing was leaking out except a little of the lubricant they had used, and this tended to dry quickly on her skin without leaving any visible residue.

Speaking of things drying on skin, something neither he nor she had noticed while in the throes of their passion was just how much they had been sweating from all the heat they’d been generating; now, as Clara and Dan were relaxing in her bed, all that sweat evaporating from their naked flesh chilled them so much that they actually started shivering. It was she who moved first, sitting up and clambering over to lay her head on his chest and drape her body over his. Feeling renewed warmth from everywhere her skin was touching his, he gladly wrapped one arm around her back and laid the other across her shoulders, and let her intertwine her legs with his as she snuggled in closer.

For what seemed like a very long time, neither of them spoke. Then, as Dan felt himself almost drifting off to sleep, he snapped awake when Clara suddenly said “I loved making a baby with you, Dan. That was amazing.”

“Hmm,” Dan mumbled. “You were amazing too, Clara. You’re so...”—Dan struggled a moment to find a word that fit—“...giving.”

“I say you’re the one who was giving, Dan; as in, giving me your baby?”

“Eh, yeah, that’s true. What I mean is, you’re so giving of _you_ ; like, you gave me yourself so willingly.”

“You were the one giving _me_ some of yourself, right up inside me.”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that, but—” Dan felt a certain slightly sticky wetness where his little girlfriend’s vulva was pressed against his thigh. “Um, by the way, you’re leaking a bit, Clara.”

Clara immediately sat up and looked down. To her horror, she discovered she was indeed leaking out on his thigh. “Oh no! If it doesn’t stay in me, I won’t have a baby!”

Dan sat up too and tried to calm her. “Don’t worry. Mom told me that’s not true; your chances of having a baby are still just as good. We just need to get you cleaned up...”

“Wait a second; my _chances_? You mean I might _not_ have a baby anyway?”

“What, nobody told you? It’s called _trying_ for a baby: you don’t get one every time you do it, Clara.”

“Then I might not have a baby yet...” She looked rather disappointed.

Dan suppressed a chuckle. “Well, of course you don’t yet. My sperm are only just getting started looking for your egg. Trust me, though: if it’s there, they’ll find it.”

“If it’s there? You mean maybe it isn’t?”

Dan shrugged. “It probably is. Mom said it’s usually there about a week before you start your monthly bleeding, and she said it’s been about three weeks since your last time, so...”

“But what if it isn’t?”

“Well... then we’ll just have to try again. ‘If at first you don’t succeed...’”

“But when will we know if we do?”

“That’s easy: if you don’t bleed when you’re supposed to, then we’ll know it worked and you’re having my baby.” As Clara processed this, Dan continued to stare at the small puddle she had leaked on his thigh with some concern. “Seriously, though: we need to get you cleaned up. I’m sure Mom packed some Kleenex in my bag...”

Clara plugged herself with a couple fingers, and Dan held his hand on his thigh to try to keep the puddle from running too much as he awkwardly staggered across the room to fetch his overnight bag with the portable tissue packet his mom had indeed packed within it. Superior as the actual experience of making a baby (well, _trying_ to make a baby, he reminded himself) had been to his fantasies about it, this difference was mildly disappointing: he’d always thought how nice it would be not to have a mess to clean up afterward. Next time, he thought, he should leave his bag on the floor next to the bed so he wouldn’t have to get up to go get it.

“Next time,” he grumbled, as he used one tissue to wipe that sticky stuff from the fingers of his one hand and from his thigh after giving Clara one to wipe herself, “I’m keeping this bag right here.”

“Next time?”

“Well, yeah. We might have to try again for that baby, remember?”

“When’s that gonna be?”

“Maybe tomorrow night, my place?”

“So soon?” Clara sounded pleasantly surprised rather than disappointed when asking that question, Dan noticed.

“Of course. We shouldn’t wait to see if it worked this time. We should get some of my baby batter up in there every day so you get your best shot at having that baby.”

“Even if it did work this time?”

“Even if it did, there’s no way we can know that now, is there? Besides, this is great fun; I don’t see why we shouldn’t go on doing it even after it does work.”

Clara gave Dan a seductive look that left him little doubt what she had on her mind. “Can we do it again tonight?”

Dan felt a certain desire that had been resting comfortably after recently being satisfied now stirring from its slumber. “I don’t see why not,” he said. Clara continued to give him that seductive look, as if expecting him to say more. For a moment, he said nothing just to keep her in suspense, and then: “You wanna do it again?”

“Sure!”

———————————————————————————————————————

The moment Elisa was back in the bathroom, Jack closed the door behind her as quickly as he could without slamming it, and locked it. Then he turned to her and immediately swept her into his embrace, leaning over and planting a big sloppy kiss on her lips the way he’d seen a boy do with a girl in one of those old 1980s movies his parents had allowed him to watch because it was for kids; to be honest, he’d never thought he’d learned anything useful from that scene either until just now. Much to his surprise, unlike the girl in the movie, his little sweetheart just giggled.

“Jack, what are you doing?” laughed Elisa.

“Shhh! Keep it down, Elisa, or Ma and Pa will hear you,” Jack whispered.

She giggled again, but did lower her voice to just above a whisper as she said “Oh, is _that_ what you’re doing? Aren’t we supposed to go to bed first?”

“I told ya, I got an idea,” said Jack. “Trust me, this’ll be fun. Just follow my lead.”

“What do you got in mind?”

Jack caressed her cheek with the backs of his fingers the way he’d seen in another movie, and gave her a soft little peck on the tip of her cute little turned-up button nose. “Stick around. You’ll see.” Turning to the bathroom sink, he pulled out a drawer to one side of it (his drawer; the other one was Clara’s and Chloe’s) and retrieved the little tube his ma had left there which was labeled as water-based “personal lubricant jelly” just like Dan’s. (The boys’ mothers both shopped at many of the same kinds of stores, and both liked to save a little money by buying less expensive generic store brands that worked just as well as the named brands.) Elisa looked at it with some curiosity.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Just what it says, Elisa,” Jack said, showing her the label.

“Oh, hey! I got some of that in my overnight bag,” she said, as he stepped over and set the tube down on the bathtub rim.

“Well, good, but now you won’t need to go get it,” he said, smiling to himself about her mother’s foresight; obviously, Elisa wouldn’t have thought to pack such an item herself.

“So, you’re really going to make a baby in me?”

Jack stepped back over to Elisa and gave her another peck on her nose. “I’m gonna try,” he said, as she tittered softly. Then he lifted her little chin with his hand and planted a longer and deeper kiss on her lips. Every part of her was so cute; “that little piggy nose” her brother Dan had called that cute little button on her face, and “hideous” was his description for her in general: what was _wrong_ with that boy? Following that longer and deeper kiss, he gave her several more pecks on her nose, her cheeks, her chin, and the sides of her mouth before holding her close and whispering in her ear: “You ever take a bath with your big brother, Elisa?”

“Not since he and I was real little.”

“You wanna take one with me?”

Elisa looked over at the tub. “You mean...?”

Jack rubbed his hands up and down the back of her shirt. “Yeah. Here. Now.”

Elisa gazed up into his eyes with a mixture of curiosity and fright. “You know if we do, I’m gonna see you naked, right?”

Jack slid his hands down around her sides and began to massage her hips. “Yeah; we do kinda have to be naked to make a baby, you know.”

Elisa blushed. “You wanna see me naked too?”

Jack leaned in and kissed her again. “Yes, Elisa, I do. You’re beautiful. Every part of you is beautiful; and I want to see every part of you.”

Elisa shyly turned her head aside. “You go first.”

“Huh?”

“You take off your clothes first.”

She was stalling him, Jack realized: though she’d been naked around her big brother—and probably her ma and pa too, the way his own sisters and ma and pa had all seen him and each other in the buff—she wasn’t quite comfortable yet with the idea of somebody outside her family seeing her that way. Well, he was a little nervous about someone outside his family seeing him naked too, but he could endure the embarrassment if that someone was his favorite girl in the whole wide world. He was sure she thought the world of him too, and wanted him deep down every bit as much as he wanted her; if he had to bare himself to her first to make her see that, so be it. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he said, grabbing his shirt and fairly whipping it off over his head.

Elisa’s eyes went wide. “What’s that—”

Not one to dilly-dally, Jack undid his belt and dropped his jeans on the floor. Stepping on his socks with his heels—all the children had already taken off their shoes earlier that day when they’d gotten back from the ranch—he pulled one off and then the other, leaving him in just his undies. He already felt a bit of a blush coming to his face just from being this naked in front of his girl, but the proof of how much Elisa meant to him lay in baring it all; without any hesitation, he tugged the waistband of his undies out to keep them from snagging on his rapidly swelling pecker, and then pulled them down to his knees and let them drop the rest of the way to the floor. “There,” he said in his most matter-of-fact-ly tone.

Elisa was still a little shy, but she couldn’t conceal her curiosity and fascination at seeing Jack’s big (to her) boy part standing tall. The last time she remembered seeing one of those had been when she was four and Dan was eight and he’d stepped out of the bathroom into the hall of their Minnesota house in front of her to complain to Mommy about there being no hot water; and his boy part hadn’t been anywhere near so big, nor pointing up at the ceiling like this one. “I—” She lowered her eyes further, first to his feet, and then her own; a promise was a promise, but she just couldn’t seem to make herself do what she was supposed to. “I want you to do it, Jack,” she finally said.

“Say what?”

“I want you to take them off.”

Momentarily missing her meaning, Jack looked down at himself: he’d already taken all of “them” off. Then he looked at Elisa again, and comprehension began to dawn. “You mean...?”

“Make me naked, Jack.” She was trembling, and looked like she was about to cry.

Jack hurried over and threw his arms around her. “Elisa, it’s all right!” he insisted, kissing away a tear that was welling up in her one eye. “I’ll do it. Everything’s going to be all right.” She threw her arms around him too, buried her face in his chest, and—he couldn’t help noticing—mashed his pecker right up against him with her tummy.

He could feel the wetness from her eyes on his chest, but all she said—in a very hoarse voice—was “Do it!”

While this wasn’t quite how he’d imagined circumstances being in his fantasies of Elisa, Jack had in fact long harbored a desire to undress her himself rather than let her do it, surmising in his imagination that having his hands all over her while removing her clothes would be much more thrilling than just having his eyes all over her no matter what she might be doing. “It’s all right, Elisa,” he repeated, as he slid his hands over the wrists of her shirt sleeves and tugged her arms up over her head. “I want to touch every part of you too.”

Jack hooked his fingers into the cuffs, bunched the sleeves up in his fists, and dragged the rest of her shirt up and off over her arms and head. Tossing the shirt aside, he then wrapped his arms around her bare back and pressed her bare chest into his own and stroked her bare ribs with his hands. She embraced him again too, turning her head sideways and pressing it up against his upper chest where his pectorals would be someday. As she began to slide her hands up and down his back in time with his stroking on her ribs, he knew Elisa was starting to enjoy being felt up as much as he was enjoying feeling her up, and began to run his hands down lower toward her pink corduroy trousers.

Elisa wasn’t wearing any belt, though her trousers did have the loops for one, so when his hands found their way down to her waist, Jack immediately uncrossed his arms and felt around for her fly in front. Instead of a button or a snap, her fly had one of those fancy little clasps that he had to pull the fly’s flaps on either side toward each other to unhook. He got a bit of a thrill as he then unzipped her fly and started sliding her trousers down, knowing how close to her hidden little girly part his hands were getting.

Elisa had already taken off her socks earlier when she was in Jack’s room before she went back to get her pajamas out of the bathroom, so all she had on once her trousers came off was a soft thin pair of cotton briefs with cartoon characters from Disney’s _The Little Mermaid_ printed all over them. These he enjoyed peeling from her very slowly and carefully by sliding his fingers under them while massaging her waist, and then working them loose little by little until they slid down over her hips and thighs and knees and tumbled to the floor on their own accord. At last, his little sweetheart was completely naked—and she was squeezing him tighter in her arms than ever before.

“Don’t look!” squeaked Elisa, squashing herself up against Jack so hard that he couldn’t see either of their private parts.

“It’s all right, Elisa. You don’t have to show me if you don’t want to,” Jack assured her. “For now, let’s take that bath.”

It briefly occurred to Jack just how ridiculous he and Elisa might have looked if anyone could have seen them staggering and stumbling toward the bathtub like some kind of abominable mutation springing from a freak nuclear waste spill at a three-legged race, but it didn’t matter if they did, because nobody else was there to see them and nobody else was going to be. Though he now knew how easily his ma or pa or anyone else with a little basic knowledge could bypass the lock—he’d figured out the old credit card trick from a video he’d seen on the internet—he also knew nobody was going to: Ma and Pa had their own bathroom, Clara and Dan had gone already and probably wouldn’t need to go again until morning, and Chloe was asleep and didn’t know how to beat the lock anyway. She and he were the only witnesses to their awkward little “dance” to the tub.

In fact, Elisa had initially tried to climb up into Jack’s arms (since she couldn’t jump without putting enough distance between them for him to catch a glimpse of her privates) and have him carry her with her legs wrapped around his waist, but she was heavier than she looked and couldn’t climb very well. Also, her bare tummy wasn’t sliding at all smoothly against what were in fact the most sensitive parts of his pecker, making him feel a lot like it was getting an Indian rope burn; so he had to ask her to stop, and just let him walk her to the tub instead. Once they got there, she asked him to look up for a moment, and then turned herself around in his arms and hunched over a bit to block his view before telling him it was okay to look down again.

Of course, Jack thought Elisa’s being so shy about showing him what she had down there was getting awfully ridiculous, especially since he hadn’t hesitated to let her see what he was packing. However, he was used to seeing rather a lot of her back from all those times he’d spent holding her on his lap, and wasn’t going to force the issue. Speaking of holding her on his lap, he got to do this again when they sat down in the tub; and since there were no clothes between them this time, his swollen “thingy” (as she was calling it now) was sticking up right between her legs in front of her own little jewel as she reached forward to turn on the water.

———————————————————————————————————————

“Is that what it sounds like?” grumbled Joe, suddenly breaking off hammering his huge dong into Francis and sitting up at the sound of running water. “Is that little wanker taking a bath again already? He just had one last night! He’d better not be running up our water bill jerking off in the tub again.” (His wife hadn’t told him, but he hadn’t had much trouble figuring out why his boy had been taking so many baths, since he’d done similar things himself when he was a boy.)

“Oh, baby,” groaned Francis, “how can you worry about a silly little thing like that at a time like this? Forget about him! Focus on what you’re doing here.” She thrust her hips upward to keep the rhythm of their thrusting and heaving going. “Focus on what _I’m_ doing here!” She was even more annoyed than usual at his getting distracted in the middle of doing the wild thing with her (one of those downright infuriating things he did sometimes that she’d just had to learn how to tolerate as a part of keeping their marriage going) because she was also scared stiff from having a pretty good idea of what Jack was actually doing in that tub. Oddly enough, the rush of adrenaline and rapid pounding of her heart from this terror was also giving her a raw sexual thrill and getting her closer to her point of no return... if Joe would only give her that extra little push over the edge.

Fortunately, Joe actually listened to her for once, and turned his attentions back her way with renewed vigor. “Oh, is that the way you’re gonna be? Well, I’ll save up his whupping for tomorrow... after I get finished pounding you!” he growled, and started jack-hammering her with a vengeance. It didn’t take him or Francis long to “reach the mountaintop” (as she liked to put it) and “erupt” (as he liked to extend her metaphor) after that.

———————————————————————————————————————

Elisa didn’t mind so much when Jack reached forward over her to cut off the water once it reached a proper level in the tub, even though it made his thingy lurch forward a bit and she knew he could see over her shoulder. She was getting fascinated with his big fleshy pole (which, also standing at about four inches long, looked even larger to her than Dan’s did to Clara) and wanted to play with it. While he wrapped his arms around her chest and nuzzled her neck with his chin, she concentrated on grabbing his thingy with both hands the way she would a baseball bat, and was delighted to feel it swelling even more as she squeezed it.

“Whoa! Careful, there!” groaned Jack. “You keep doing that, and it’s gonna explode!”

Elisa grinned mischievously. “Keep doing what?” she asked, and squeezed a little harder. “This?”

“Ah... ah... ah... Yeah, that!” panted Jack.

“Right... Keep doing that... You got it!” she said, and continued squeezing without mercy.

The feel of Elisa’s fingers curled around his pecker and squeezing was indeed stirring up Jack in ways he’d often stirred himself up while curling the fingers of his hand around it back when he’d regularly indulged his erotic fantasies in this tub, but now some of her squeezing was making him very uncomfortable, and not in an awkwardly pleasurable way. She wasn’t listening to his warnings to stop, and explaining what she was doing wrong would take too long, even if he could find the words to say in a moment like this (which he was none too sure he could); he had to find a way to distract her. Releasing her from his arms, he reached over to grab the soap bar, and started working up some lather in his hands.

Elisa was having a good time playing with Jack’s thingy when suddenly he laid each of his soapy hands on each of her thighs and began sliding them down between them toward her own thingy. She’d been so caught up in what she was doing that she’d left the cleft between her legs wide open to both his vision and his touch, and now his pointer fingers and thumbs were attacking, sliding up and down on those little lips on either side of her slit as he dipped his soapy hands between her thighs repeatedly. These strokes felt kinda strange, but surprisingly good as well; she felt those lips begin to swell, as if rising to meet his fingers.

The distraction had worked: Elisa was leaning back and wriggling all around on his lap as Jack went to town on her little family jewel with his fingers. Her previous shyness was forgotten now, as she let him look—as well as touch her—there freely; and though she still had both hands on his big pulsing boy pole, she had likewise forgotten about squeezing it, leaving it free to throb to its own rhythm. “Mmm! Oh, Jack! That feels great!” she moaned.

“That’s how it’s supposed to feel,” Jack said. He shifted one hand into position and began to stroke and poke that little slit between those two swollen lips with his middle finger while he picked up the soap bar again with his other hand and kneaded it between his fingers to get more of its slipperiness on that hand. Putting the bar back in its rack, he then proceeded to take each of Elisa’s hands in turn into his own and rub their palms and fingers between his own hand’s until they were likewise slippery with soap suds. She could see and feel what he was doing with her hands, but she hardly cared as she felt waves of pleasure washing over her from how the middle finger on his other hand was beginning to dip deeper and deeper into her groove.

“Mmm... Jack... Jack... Jack...” As she closed her eyes and threw her head back, Elisa felt as if she were strapped to a balloon carrying her higher and higher into the sky until it could rise no further. She felt as if just a little bit higher was something even more wonderful if only she could reach it, but she need just a little something more, something only the deepest strokes from the big boy whose name she was moaning over and over and over could give her... His finger tip slid through the tough and turgid folds of flesh pressing against it on either side of the entrance to her tight little tunnel and up into her, and her heart jumped as the rest of his finger slipped and slid over that strange little hooded thing at the top of her slit, sending a sharp little pleasurable pulse rippling through her body; yes, that was what she needed, that—

Suddenly, Elisa and Jack simultaneously felt his finger tip bump up against something inside her, some barrier stretched across her little tunnel with both the firmness and flexibility of an ultra-thin sheet of rubber and the softness and smoothness of a freshly tanned calfskin hide recently hung out to dry. As his fingernail jabbed into it, she felt rather uncomfortable, and then very uncomfortable; then she yelped in pain as she felt a burning sensation as if a hornet had just stung her in there. He realized just a moment too late that what his finger had just encountered and torn asunder was that “maidenhead” thing his ma had mentioned; which had indeed felt a lot like a scab being peeled away before it should be as his ma had said, except that it was his poor little sweetheart rather than himself who’d felt the pain.

At about the same moment Jack was recalling these things, Elisa was remembering how her mommy had compared the sensation of her hymen rupturing to the sting of having her ears pierced. What she felt now was both less and more painful than that time she went to get her ears pierced at the mall’s jewelry shop a few weeks before she entered kindergarten: less because her earlobes had been much thicker and there had been two of them to be pierced, and more because once the momentary stinging sensations had subsided, the lingering soreness had felt more like a dull ache than the raw and tender hotness like that of a scrape wound she was feeling within her now. She immediately thrust her hands down between her thighs to try to cover the injury as she would one of those scrapes, but each hand in turn slapped against Jack’s, and she still couldn’t fit either of them inside to cover it as she wanted after he immediately withdrew his own hand; the pain had no relief but for her to press her hands against her mound and try not to move around very much.

Seeing the tears welling up in Elisa’s eyes and hearing her draw a deep breath, Jack drew back one shoulder and thrust the other forward to make her face pitch sideways, and then leaned over and covered her mouth completely with his own before he even realized why he should do this. Her muffled scream that seemed to rattle and ricochet off his own voice box confirmed that his instincts had been sound: while his ma and pa might well have heard it, they would not come running as they likely would have if she had been allowed to give it full vent. A scream to the heavens would have sounded like bloody murder, which would count as an exception to their rule against leaving their room until morning once they’d locked the door; for a muffled scream like that of a girl with her face in her pillow awakening from a nightmare, on the other hand, they would not budge from their bed.

Elisa struggled and tried to force her head in one direction and then the other to pull her mouth away from his, but Jack’s fear of exposure at such a vulnerable moment was making him even more hideously strong than her panic and confusion at being restrained and suppressed was making her, and she could not break free. Moreover, with her arms pinned to her sides from his bear-hugging her, she would not have had the best of leverage in her struggles even if she were a lot stronger. After her initial burst of energy wore off, she went limp in his arms and whimpered softly into his mouth as she began crying again.

As Jack realized Elisa had truly surrendered and the strength born from his fear began to dissipate, the tears trickling from her eyes and the soft sobbing in her throat made him feel like a total jerk, and his swollen pecker consequently began to collapse like a party balloon with the air leaking out when its neck wasn’t properly tied. Pulling his mouth off of hers and loosening his arms, he curled one hand down around her hip and raised the other to cradle one side of her face, cradling the other side in his shoulder as he tried to soothe her grief and pain. “Please, Elisa... my sweet... my darling... don’t cry. Please...”

Elisa opened her eyes and glared up at him, and for all his brute strength and toughness in general, Jack shrank from her angry gaze; “I’m sorry...!” he whimpered. Then her eyes flooded with tears again, and she buried her face in his shoulder in her embarrassment. Ashamed and sad and at a loss for what to do, he just lay there with her awkwardly draped over him that way until her tears and sobbing and shaking ceased, and waited to see what would happen next.

Much to Jack’s surprise, when Elisa finally made her move, it was to turn over her hips to plant her knees on either side of his hips and straddle him so that she was facing him. She raised her face from his shoulder as she planted her hands just in front of her knees, and he saw her puffy eyes wince a little as she settled her little rump back down on his thighs. He winced a little himself in sympathy, and then happened to look down at her little cleft (which she was no longer even pretending to be trying to conceal from him) and immediately knew what the problem was: as he watched, a tiny trail of blood trickled down from it, puddled up slightly at the bottom, and from there formed into a drop which tumbled over and dripped down into the water between his thighs. “Elisa, you’re bleeding!” he said, a little more loudly than he should.

“Course I am,” she said at a somewhat more appropriate volume. “You pierced it.”

Now Jack was feeling like _he_ wanted to cry. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to...”

To his surprise, Elisa flashed him a weak little smile. “Jack... It’s all right now. I’m gonna be okay.”

“But I hurt you...”

“Mommy said this could happen. She put a pad in my bag just in case. It’s not as bad as my period, though.”

Indeed, Jack realized, there was much more blood when a girl was—as his ma put it—on the rag; or at least there was in Clara’s case: he’d seen one of her used pads in the garbage. Elisa presumably bled that much too, or somewhere in the same ballpark anyway. “But... I mean... you were crying!”

“I know. I cried when they pierced my ears too...”

“When your—?” For the first time in all the time he’d known her, Jack looked at Elisa’s earlobes and noticed the tiny pair of rounded silver studs in them; and felt stupid for not having noticed them until now in all the time he’d spent admiring her looks, necking with her as he held her on his lap, and kissing and caressing her face. “But you were screaming too.” He felt even stupider the moment those words were out of his mouth: what was he trying to do, make her hate him?

“And it’s a good thing you stopped me. Our daddies are supposed to be _surprised_ ,” Elisa said. “You don’t want your daddy to know before he’s supposed to, do you?”

She had a point, though Jack couldn’t help wondering why she’d struggled against him so hard then if she was being so understanding now; but he had a feeling it would be a bad idea to remind her of this. “Well, you ain’t gonna have a baby just from sticking my fingers in ya,” he said. Looking down at his drooping little pecker, he added “I gotta get this thing in there.”

Following his gaze with her own, Elisa smirked. “Don’t look like that’s gonna be so hard to do.”

“Well, yeah, but then I gotta spray my baby batter in you. It’s gotta be standing up good and straight for that.”

“You can’t just pee it out?”

“Sure can’t. Believe me, I know.”

Elisa grinned. “Then I guess I just have to help you stand your thingy up again.” Just as soon as these words were out of her mouth, Jack felt his pecker give a little lurch, and they both saw it flop over backward and start growing. “Hey, there it goes now!”

“You’re helping just by being here,” Jack said, watching his rising pole almost instantly grow an inch. “You don’t have to be shy. You’re just as pretty down there as everywhere else.” As Elisa looked down at her exposed cleft and blushed, he remembered once again how exciting it had been to undress her, and to see and feel her little naked body for the first time. His pole grew another inch.

Elisa was still blushing when she looked up, but she didn’t try to cover herself. Instead, she smiled sweetly and gave him a light peck on his lips. “You wanted to make a baby in me a long time, didn’t you?” she said, as he added another inch to his baby-maker.

“That’s right. I’ve thought about it most every night for months.” His rod was now as tall as it could get, and the head was flaring out like a mushroom’s.

Elisa looked down again. “Wow, Jack, your thingy’s huge. Is it gonna fit?”

Flattered as he was, Jack knew her question was a problem that needed answering. “It’ll fit,” he said. “That’s what the lubricant’s for. I’m just gonna have to go easy on you, that’s all.” His pecker’s head quit filling out so much and his rod eased back down just a tiny little bit. “See, this thing here, it can adjust.” Looking over at her dripping little cleft again, he said “I think you might ought to want to clean yourself up first, though. Blood gets sticky real quick.”

Remembering the good feelings from before, Elisa gave him a mischievous little smile and said “You could do it for me...”

Jack was tempted, but demurred. “The last time my finger went in there, it hurt you,” he said. “You know when it hurts and when it doesn’t better than I do.” As he said this, Elisa noticed with some concern that his thingy was losing height again; almost a whole inch.

“Well, I guess I can use my own fingers...” she said, and noticed with some satisfaction that his thingy was rising back up. “You like that, don’t you?” she said. “You wanna watch me do it.”

Jack blushed a little, but didn’t act ashamed. “That must be what it’s like when—”

“When what?”

“Never mind.” Jack didn’t feel like telling her his speculations about how girls probably rubbed themselves to get excited while fantasizing about making babies with boys right now. “Tell ya what, while you’re doing that, you can watch me wash my pecker too.” Elisa giggled softly. “What?”

“You called your thingy a ‘pecker.’ That’s funny.”

“Why? That’s what I’ve always called it. My pa calls his that too.”

“Your daddy calls it his ‘pecker’ too?” Elisa giggled harder, but then suddenly stopped as she noticed his thingy shrinking again. “Oh, you don’t like when I do that...”

“Look, I’ll call it my ‘thingy’ or whatever you want, but we need to get going here. The water’s getting cold. Now, you wanna watch me wash my p— my thingy, or not?”

“Sure!”

Jack reached over for the soap bar, worked up some lather on it, and gave some to Elisa. “After you wash it, you’ll need to rinse that stuff out. Soap gets sticky when it’s dry too.” This was something he’d learned from his early experiences with “washing” himself while fantasizing in the tub: if he did it more than once in a night, he could get another few spurts out, but his skin would get sore in very sensitive (and embarrassing) places from being rubbed too much with soap. In fact, though he wasn’t lying when he said the soap got sticky when dry, he’d found that it still rubbed him raw even when he used a completely fresh new batch of lather.

Elisa did put on quite a show for him, running her soapy fingers up into her... thingy (if she was going to call his boyish pole that, surely he could call her girly little hole that too) and wriggling them all around inside of her for longer than was probably necessary. Then—of course—she had to rinse the soap off and slip her fingers in and wiggle them all around inside of her for longer than was probably necessary several more times to “make sure” she’d really gotten all the soap out. As promised, Jack likewise demonstrated to her how he wrapped his hand around his thingy and stroked it up and down while lightly squeezing it to make it good and stiff, though he was careful to go at an easy pace so he wouldn’t go off too soon and waste his baby batter in the water.

When they were both sure Elisa had gotten all the blood and soap out, Jack rinsed all the soap off his thingy as well, and then turned on the faucet for a while to add some more hot water; as mentioned, what they had in there already was getting cold. Reaching over to where he’d left the tube of lubricant earlier, he now squeezed a small blob of it out into his palm and hers, and then they got to watch each other play with themselves again while applying it to their thingies. The final thing they needed to do was “get comfortable”—as he put it—so they wouldn’t get too distracted from making that baby; to this end, they unknowingly maneuvered themselves into a position remarkably similar to the one Dan and Clara had been using a bit earlier: he sitting up straight with his knees propped up behind her, she straddling him as she suspended herself over him on bent knees with her rump leaning against his thighs, his and her thingies thereby pointed directly at each other.

As lovely little Elisa gazed deep into his eyes with unmistakable desire, Jack thought of what his ma had said about the differences between how animals and people made their babies; being face to face with his little sweetheart, holding her, touching her, gazing into her eyes, and kissing her really was a far cry from how the dogs and goats around the family homestead did all their whelping and kidding. The “act of love,” his ma had called it; he might never understand what the love keeping Ma and Pa together even now that they couldn’t have babies anymore was like, but seeing the smoldering look his beloved was giving him now, he knew “act of love” was the right term for it. Even if it might hurt a bit, his beloved wanted her big lover boy to thrust his big boy pole deep up into her little girly tunnel and put a baby in her every bit as much as he was wanting her to come get that baby in her by driving her little girly tunnel down over his big boy pole.

The moment Jack had been imagining for months was here: as he gripped the sides of her little waist in his hands to help maneuver her down, lovely little Elisa slid herself carefully down his thighs until his slick and swollen lower head slid right between her similarly engorged and slippery lower lips. If four thick inches of eleven-year-old Dan’s bulging boyhood had been a bit daunting to little eight-year-old Clara, eleven-year-old Jack’s similarly substantial four inches were an even more excessive immensity for little seven-year-old Elisa to have to squeeze into her compact conduit. Nevertheless, when gravity alone proved inadequate to cram the driving wedge of his lower head any further in through her opening, she just squeezed her eyes shut, spread her thighs wider, and pushed.

Seeing Elisa struggling so hard touched Jack’s heart with sorrow, and just as he was about to tell her she didn’t have to do this—that he didn’t want her to hurt herself—he felt something give way and looked down to see he was already a full inch into her. Being “adjustable” had done the trick: when sorrow dampened his excitement, his swelling had gone down about half an inch, and that shrinkage had been enough to slide his widest point through her front door. Now, as she continued to slide her slickness slowly down his slippery pole despite its rapid reflation, she opened her eyes and smiled the exhausted-and-yet-triumphant smile of a girl who’d just done a deed no one would have thought she could do.

Gradually and yet inexorably, as Jack leaned in and kissed her to distract her from some of the wincing she was still doing, Elisa continued to impale herself on him as deeply as he could go; which turned out to be just a little over three and a half inches in before the little hole on the tip bumped up against her tiny cervix. While neither he nor she were familiar with these internal parts and what they were called (these not having been very prominent features of their rather impromptu sexual educations), they both felt the bump and knew they could go no further. When the bump jolted the raw spot where her hymen had been torn one last time, and he leaned in to kiss her again at seeing her wince, she rose to meet him with a passionate kiss of her own.

As with Clara and Dan, once this little boy’s parts were mated together with this even littler girl’s, neither one was going to be able to pull them apart again until the deed was done; and just like their amorous best friends, neither he nor she cared. The feel of Elisa’s tight tunnel squeezing rhythmically against his penile flesh on every side was the greatest feeling Jack had ever had, and despite the brief moments of pain when anything shifted near her sore spot, she was also loving the feeling of his thingy pulsing against hers deep within her. Once again, she felt the balloons lifting her higher and higher... almost high enough, if those little jabs of pain hadn’t kept dragging her back down.

Realizing the waves of pleasure pulsing through her were coming from everywhere Jack was pressing his flesh against hers, Elisa pressed her flat naked chest against his as hard as she could until she feel his heart throbbing against hers, and thrust her mouth aggressively into his so that he couldn’t even come up for air for a moment. Her triple attack was so violent that he was forced to lie back, which in turn pressed every inch of the top half of his penile shaft up against every inch of the top half of her vaginal canal—including that weird little sensitive hooded thing at the top of her entrance she was not well-learned enough to know was called her clitoris. She felt the balloons shoot up, hauling her almost up into the great beyond she just knew was there... and then her arms wrapped tight around her lover dragged her down with him as he laid himself back, and the old familiar jab of pain brought her back down.

So close, she was so close! Releasing Jack from her arms, Elisa sat up on his lap, felt his thingy’s upper half pressing against hers again, and felt herself flying up so high... No pain this time, but her flight wasn’t taking her high enough. She needed the rest of him pressed up against her to make it.

Jack was feeling an old familiar rising within his already-risen part. Elisa’s rocking him back on his back had somehow plunged him even deeper into her, though there was still nowhere for his tip to go at the end of the line. He wanted to feel her throbbing heart pressed against his again, here at the end of their passionate journey. He wanted her to feel him going over the edge from what she was doing to him.

Just as Elisa leaned forward to embrace Jack, he sat up to embrace her, and their mouths collided in a frenzy of kisses as she pulled his chest up against hers. She raised her hips ever so slightly—her impalement on him wouldn’t let her rise without taking him with her—and jerked back just enough to feel the top half of his thingy pressing hard against hers again. Then she did it again, and then again, and then again...

Jack was past the point of no return; as his pole stiffened and bulged against Elisa’s inner walls one last time, he thrust his hips up and felt the first sticky rope of his baby batter exploding forth deep into his little sweetheart instead of out onto his chest. Another eruption followed, and another, another, another, another—six blasts of his sticky sperm in all sallying forth to find the egg in his beloved little girlfriend’s seven-year-old womb; and if it was there, to make it into a baby she could one day proudly present to her mommy and daddy. Yet the baby would always actually be his and her proud achievement; all these thoughts and feelings flooded through his heart and mind in a single stream of consciousness as the former leaped in his chest in time with each explosion.

Feeling those six sudden pulses so out of step with their previous rhythm in Jack’s chest and in his thingy deep within her, Elisa knew that he had reached that place she was trying to first; and just when she was so close! She didn’t know exactly why, but her instincts told her she had to move fast, that if she didn’t reach that height now, she was never going to. Thrusting her hips back again, and again, and again, and again, oh, she was so close...!

Coming back down from that height he’d reached, Jack felt Elisa’s hips tugging on him again and again and again... seven times in all. Was that what she did when she felt the fireworks going off inside? Girls didn’t make baby batter, though, did they?

“Don’t— Don’t leave—” Elisa was struggling to say something as she leaned back hard on his rapidly wilting hose. “Don’t leave me... hanging...”

In a truly inspired move, Jack suddenly realized what Elisa was doing, and what he had to do: every time she’d tugged against him, it had brought the back of his boy pole rubbing up against that weird little hooded thing at the top of her tiny entrance; but now that his pole was rapidly turning into a limp rope, she wasn’t finding enough stiffness to stroke her there properly. Bringing his hand down between her thighs, he whipped out his pointer finger and pushed the tip hard against that little knob. She jerked back again, this time reflexively rather than deliberately, but she immediately thrust herself forward again to meet his finger for two more pokes.

When Elisa felt Jack’s finger jab against her sensitive spot, the balloons gave way to a mighty rocket that flew her up to the stars. She shook violently with each pleasurable burst of its fuel: a second one, a third, and then a fourth little boost. Her flight was complete, and though she was seemingly sinking back down to rise no more, she was satisfied just to have been up there.

Jack felt a burning heat in little Elisa’s tummy as he took her up in his arms to keep her from knocking her head against something with all that violent shaking she was doing. When the shaking stopped, he touched his lips to hers for a soft gentle kiss—not a hard violent one like the ones they’d been planting on each other before—and waited for her to open her eyes. When she did, and saw him smiling warmly down at her, she giggled just a little and then grinned and just said... “Hi.”

Spent, but thoroughly satisfied, Jack released Elisa from his arms and laid himself out on his back in the water with his eyes closed. She watched as his now limp thingy shrank down surprisingly small and slipped out of her. Then she saw a little trickle of some kinda watery grayish-whitish stuff—like that lubricant stuff they’d used, but a bit thicker—come trickling out after it.

“Some of the stuff that makes babies is coming back out,” she said.

Jack opened his eyes. “I know. Ma says that happens sometimes. Don’t worry about it: with all the baby batter I shot into you, a little bit leaking back out won’t make any difference.” He closed his eyes again.

Weakly gathering a little water up into her hand, Elisa rinsed the trickle away. Then she laid herself down on Jack with her head on his chest, and they quietly cuddled together in each other’s arms in the warm contentment of their afterglow. For what felt like a very long time for a couple of children so young, they neither moved nor spoke.

When the bath water was finally getting too cold to ignore, and the warmth of their skin on each other’s skin could no longer keep them from shivering a bit, Elisa and Jack got up and let the water out of the tub. On his suggestion, they ran just a little more hot water for a very brief shower (as in one about ten seconds long) so they could rinse off any residue their activities this evening might have gotten on them. Then they enjoyed drying each other off and rubbing a little warmth into themselves and each other with the big fluffy bath towels.

After that, they had to gather up all the clothes they had shed, including Elisa’s pajamas, which she proceeded to put on over those _Little Mermaid_ briefs _._ As with just about everything she wore, Jack thought those soft pink frilly night clothes looked good on her, and he regretted only that he hadn’t brought in his own pajamas to wear. Figuring there was no one around to see them, he only put his underwear back on before dashing across the hall to his room with the rest of his clothes in his hand; then, looking both directions down the hall and seeing no one, he signaled to her to follow suit.

Once they and all their clothes were both safely in his room, Jack locked the door and went to put on his own generically military-themed camouflage-patterned pajamas before giving Elisa a kiss goodnight and showing her to his bed. Like Clara’s bed, his was a bunk bed; in fact, he had originally shared this one with her back before he got this bedroom all to himself when Chloe outgrew her crib and his ma and pa decided to put his sisters together in their own room. Like his sister, he also usually slept on the top bunk, but tonight he was going to be cuddling up to sleep with his little sweetheart in the bottom one.

———————————————————————————————————————

Mama and Papa didn’t believe the monsters were real, but little Chloe knew better: this very night, she’d heard their horrible croaking growling voices coming up from under the bed, laughing to each other about that silly little girl whose mama and papa were too stupid to know to keep her together with her big sister to keep her safe from them. Hearing that was bad enough, but what truly terrified her was the moment when one of the monsters squeezed his wrinkled ugly splotchy pale-blue-and-green-skinned head up over the side of her bed facing the wall. She leaped to her feet on the bed with a scream, stomped his head back down with her foot, and then made one of the longest leaps she had ever made in her life: jumping nearly all the way across the room to the door so the monsters couldn’t snatch her off her feet and drag her under the bed for whatever horrible things they did to little girls down there, she opened the door and ran for her life down the hall.

Even at her tender age, Chloe understood her ma and pa’s rule about their locked door perfectly well: they wouldn’t open up for anything that wasn’t important, and since they didn’t believe in the monsters, her screaming about them was not one of those important things. Her big brother Jack was sometimes willing to let her in his room when she got frightened at night, but lately he’d taken to locking his door and not wanting to let her in either for some reason. There was only one obvious place she could run to be safe from the monsters: her old bedroom which now belonged to her big sister Clara.

Sliding her knees back to straighten her legs, Clara closed her thighs—and thereby her baby hole—to “trap” Dan’s baby-maker within her (though he would hardly have much trouble slipping it back out of her if she wanted to, considering how quickly it was already softening and shrinking) and laid her naked little body out on top of his with her face nuzzling into his chest. As he shifted around a bit and enfolded her in his arms to make her snuggling with him more comfortable, she heaved a big sigh of contentment; although the second time hadn’t been as amazingly mind-blowing as the first, she was starting to think she’d like to do lots more of this baby-making “sex” stuff at other times even when they weren’t trying for a baby. He, meanwhile, was thinking of what his mom had said about how this deed they’d done twice now would work best when it was truly an “act of love” for him in which he cared more about what the girl wanted than what he did; while he might not be at that point with his beloved just yet, seeing the pure bliss on her face as she buried her face in his chest and realizing just how much she enjoyed doing these things with him made the pleasure he’d taken from his lone fantasies about her seem downright paltry in comparison.

They were once again lounging together in languid contentment in this manner when they both heard Chloe’s scream and some bumping sounds from her room, followed by the opening of her door and the muffled thudding of her approaching footsteps on the hall carpet. Clara had just barely raised her head with a quizzical expression on her face and Dan was just opening his eyes when the little kindergartner burst in on them. When she saw them lying there coupled together and naked as jaybirds in the soft glow of the lamplight, to say this was an awkward moment for all three of the children would have been a massive understatement.

“The monsters— You’re— They gonna— I— What—” Chloe couldn’t seem to complete a coherent thought, let alone a sentence. Clara tried to get up to go take hold of her sister so she could turn her around and take her somewhere else while explaining the situation to her (though what she was going to tell her, she had no idea at the moment), but tripped while getting up off of her lover and instead tumbled clumsily to the floor in a kind of flip-over that left her lying there with her legs jackknifed out in a weird way that left all her nakedness exposed in an even more awkwardly embarrassing way. As for Dan, after seeing all of these things transpire in front of him, he could only slap one hand over his eyes from embarrassment in a kind of facepalm as he discreetly covered his still slightly slimy deflated protrusion with the other.

Clara didn’t stay there on the floor very long, of course, immediately steadying herself on her back before getting up on her feet; but in that moment, the poor little kindergartner caught a glimpse of that little hole between her big sister’s thighs hanging slightly open with a little bit of some kinda slimy stuff seeping out of it, and was grossed out. Chloe covered her mouth with one hand and squeezed her eyes shut and looked like she was about to cry, throw up, or both as her big sister rushed over to try to comfort her. Dan, having just gotten over how embarrassed he was at these events and taken his hand from his eyes, discreetly reached for a blanket to cover his nakedness a little more adequately than just having his hand over his crotch while he watched his beloved wrap her arms around her little sister and try to tell her everything was all right.

“It’s okay, Chloe, it’s okay,” Clara was saying. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s gonna be okay now.”

Chloe didn’t seem very comforted, but at least she seemed to find her voice. “Monsters—there’s monsters under my bed!” she whimpered. “And they after me— Clara, you’re naked!”

“Yeah, I know, but it’s okay! Trust me! I was just— Um, let me think...”

Just then, the girls heard Dan—now sufficiently swaddled in one of Clara’s blankets to salvage at least some of his dignity—close the bedroom door, and turned to hear him softly say “We really ought to keep it down. Your folks are sleeping, you know.”

“Why is Dan naked too?” asked Chloe, her fright beginning to fade as her curiosity began to take over.

“Uh... because... Because, we... uh...” Clara stalled.

“Because we like being naked together,” Dan said, with a wry little smile. Sometimes, he thought, speaking the obvious truth without saying very much was better than trying to think up some excuse like Clara seemed to be trying to do.

Chloe tilted her head a bit to one side. “Why you like that?”

Dan shrugged a shoulder. “Because it’s fun.”

“But why?”

“It just is,” said Clara, trying Dan’s approach, but then immediately volunteering “kinda like kissing.” It seemed she didn’t get the part about not saying very much, Dan thought.

Chloe made a face. “Ewww!”

“Hey, you asked,” said Dan, taking over before Clara could volunteer anything more, “but anyway... what’s that you were saying about a monster?”

Chloe’s eyes went a little wild. “Under my bed! I heard them! Saw one come up! Don’t let them get me! Let me sleep with you!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, now!” said Dan. “Calm down, Chloe. It’s all right; you’re safe with us now. You just had a bad dream, that’s all.”

“Weren’t no dream! I saw him! Stomped on his head!” Chloe said, and began bawling on her sister’s shoulder. Clara immediately hugged her closer and tried to comfort her some more, and Dan put his arms around them both to make it a group hug. He knew from some of his chatting with Jack about their mom and dad’s rule about their locked door, but he also suspected if her crying got her dad’s attention and he overheard anything interesting she happened to be saying—such as the word “naked” earlier—the man might just get curious and come looking to find out what exactly was going on in this room just two doors down the hall. Also, Dan thought, it would probably be better not to disturb his friend and little sister from whatever they might happen to be doing with each other in the room next door (even if they were just cuddled up and sleeping by now, as was likely).

The group hug was effective, and Chloe soon stopped crying. “If you want to sleep with us to keep you safe from the monsters, that’s okay with me,” said Clara. “Dan, how about you?” Looking over her sister’s shoulder, she shot him a look warning him this arrangement had better be okay with him too.

Though Dan still didn’t think there really were any monsters under Chloe’s bed, he had figured out by now that trying to tell her this wouldn’t help; and besides, he didn’t really mind having a little extra company tonight. The bed had two bunks, and just one of them was already more than enough space for him to share with Clara, so there was plenty of room for her little sister on the other bunk. “Sure, I don’t see why not,” he said.

“Oh, goody!” said Chloe, and threw an arm around each of them to return the group hug. This happened to make Dan’s blanket slip, revealing his (now mostly dry) boyish protrusion to her. Her eyes widened a bit. “But first, you guys gotta put some clothes on.”

“Yeah, we probably should,” said Dan. “We were done with being naked anyway.”

He was just about to go scoop up his discarded underwear and pajamas off the floor when Clara said “No, wait: I got a better idea.”

“Eh? What’s that?”

She turned to her sister. “Chloe, you wanna know why we like being naked together?”

Chloe looked up with renewed curiosity. “Why?”

“Take off your clothes. We’ll show you.”

“Uh, Clara, what are you doing?” asked Dan. “It’s late. We should get to bed already.”

“Sure, but first let’s show Baby Chloe here why it’s so much fun to be naked together.”

Chloe pouted; she hated when Clara called her that. “I ain’t no baby!”

“Are too,” Clara said.

“Am not!”

“You’re a little baby who gets grossed out by kissing and is too scared to get naked with a boy.”

“Uh, girls—” Dan interjected, but neither of the sisters paid him any attention.

“Am not!” Chloe insisted again.

“Oh yeah? Prove it!”

“I show you,” Chloe declared. Turning to Dan, she jumped up and surprised him with a quick peck on the cheek. The moment she landed, she turned to Clara and said “There. See?”

“That was barely a kiss at all,” Clara taunted, “just a little peck like a baby would give to her mommy, because that’s what you are: a baby.”

“Clara, that’s kinda mean,” Dan objected. “You were pretty grossed out too the first time you kissed me, remember?”

She rounded on him. “I did it anyway, and I did it first. That’s ’cause I’m a big girl now, not like this baby.”

“Not a baby!” Chloe insisted again.

“Then show me,” Clara told her. Turning to Dan, she said “Bend over, Dan. Let her show me she’s not a baby.”

“Chloe,” said Dan, “That’s all right. You don’t have to do anything just because—”

“Bend over! I show you!” Chloe insisted. Reluctantly, Dan leaned over and let her get her face up close enough to his to kiss him on the lips. The little kindergartner pursed up her lips and touched them lightly but firmly to his. He heard a bit of a gagging noise somewhere in her throat, but she didn’t pull her lips back until she’d planted them properly on his for a good full moment.

“Not bad,” Clara admitted, “but now do it again.”

Chloe didn’t make that gagging noise this time. As with the first, she planted it properly and for a good length of time.

“Again, but now open your mouth. You too, Dan. She needs to know what it’s like to do it for real.”

“Ewww...” groaned Chloe, but before her big sister could taunt her for being a “baby” again, she opened her mouth and planted another kiss on Dan. He opened his mouth just a little bit—something like he’d done the first time he kissed Clara back—and let her kiss pull on him a little to prove she really was doing it

“Keep it up, Chloe. Do like I did with him. You were there. You saw us.”

The girl obliged, planting several kisses on Dan’s open mouth and even pressing a little harder on him with each one. It felt strange to him to be doing this with his little girlfriend’s even littler sister, but at the same time, it felt kinda nice too—the same as when he’d started enjoying Clara’s kisses. Chloe even started moaning out a little “Mmm!” noise and rolling her mouth a bit around his own to kiss his lips in slightly different places to add some variety.

“Not bad...” Clara admitted. “Dan, you kiss her back more too. Make her feel it.”

Dan might have objected, but Chloe’s kisses did actually feel kinda nice in a way not so different from her sister’s... and she really did seem to be getting into doing this, for all that she was still making a few goofy expressions while doing it. “Still gross... but... feels nice!” she said between several more aggressive mashes of her open mouth against his. The kissing continued for quite a while before he finally broke away to catch his breath and raised his mouth back up where she couldn’t reach it.

“Happy, Clara?” said Dan. “Those were no baby’s kisses; I’d say she’s as great a kisser as you.”

“Yeah!” added Chloe, and gave Dan’s out-of-reach lips a hungry look.

“You proved you can kiss,” Clara conceded, “but now let’s see you get naked with a boy like a big girl. Take off your clothes.”

“Clara, why does she have to—” Dan began to object.

“I do it!” Chloe proclaimed, and started trying to retract her arms into her pajama top to get it off. Though she was not having the easiest time with getting her arms free of the sleeves, Clara could see—and, in secret, admire—her baby sister’s determination.

“Wait. I got an even better idea.” Clara said. “Chloe, let Dan take off your clothes. Dan, help her get them off like you did with me.”

“But why—” Dan began objecting again.

Chloe looked up at him eagerly. “Do I get to kiss him more?”

“Oh, yeah, of course.” said Clara. “Fact, you gotta kiss him more: that’s what I did when he helped me.”

“Clara,” Dan complained, “don’t you think you’re taking this—”

“And you gotta kiss her too. That’s what you did with me,” Clara reminded him.

“Now, hold on, Clara!” Dan insisted. “Why’s this all gotta be the same with her as with you? It’s not like we’re... you know...”

“Making a baby?”

“Clara, we’re not supposed to tell her that!”

Chloe left off struggling with her pajama top for the moment “A baby? You get naked to make a baby?” Her tone was one of curiosity rather than alarm or disgust; a good sign according to Clara’s point of view.

“Nice going, Clara,” Dan grumbled.

“That’s right, Chloe,” said Clara, and then “Dan, what’s it matter? She saw us naked with each other already.”

“But the baby’s supposed to be a surprise for your dad! What if she blows our secret?”

“Secret? You was making a secret baby?” Chloe interjected.

“If she squeals on us for being naked together, it’s blown anyway. Papa’s not gonna think we were just playing _Life_ without our clothes.”

“Actually, we kinda were...” Dan mumbled sardonically, and mostly to himself. Now that he thought of it, having children was one of the more important accomplishments in that board game; and he remembered one of those books about sex talking about how, while being equipped to make babies wasn’t necessary for the individual’s survival, it was very much necessary to the survival of any species as a whole. Whether one was talking about the title of the board game or the expression for living one’s life in general, making babies was definitely a significant part of playing that game.

“What’s that?” Clara rather melodramatically cupped a hand over one ear.

Dan groaned in exasperation. “Never mind. I’m just saying, you didn’t have to tell her it was about making babies.”

“Like I say, what’s it matter? She’s not gonna tell on us; are you, Chloe?”

Seeing the stern look on her big sister’s face, Chloe shrank back a bit and meekly agreed “Course not. I don’t snitch.”

“Is that a promise?” Clara looked her directly in the eye.

“Promise.”

“You promise what?”

“Promise I don’t tell.”

“Won’t tell what?”

“Promise I don’t tell Papa I saw you and Dan was naked together to make babies.”

“There.” Clara turned to Dan. “See?”

“Yeah, she’s saying that now,” said Dan. “How do we know she won’t forget and blab on us anyway?”

“We just have to make sure she won’t. So get her clothes off.”

“How’s that—”

“If she gets naked too, she won’t forget; ’cause if she does, I’ll tell Pa she was naked with us too. You hear me, Chloe?”

“I never tell, promise!” Chloe insisted.

Clara folded her arms in satisfaction. “There. Now, off with her clothes, Dan. Chloe, start kissing him again.”

Dan couldn’t help wondering what made Clara think she had any right to go bossing him and her little sister around this way, but she did have a point about getting Chloe naked being a way to make sure she’d keep their secret. “Mutually Assured Destruction” his dad called the kind of deal they’d just made: while telling on her wouldn’t undo her telling on them, being able to do so made it far more likely she wouldn’t tell. Of course, this deal worked the same way for both sides: she could always get her revenge on them too if either of them told on her first for some reason, but that didn’t matter since they had no such reason to do so.

The best part of this deal was how Chloe was going into it so willingly. As Dan leaned in to help her get her pajama top off, she actually giggled a bit while taking this opportunity to plant a big sloppy kiss on his kisser. He couldn’t deny this felt rather good to him in its own way too, though not quite the same as it had when he’d first stripped Clara.

In fact, come to think of it, hadn’t that been one of the reasons he’d enjoyed his first time with Clara more than the second? They’d already been naked that second time, and hadn’t had to do as much hugging and kissing to get themselves ready for their coupling. Of course, her tunnel also hadn’t squeezed him so uncomfortably tightly as before either, but somehow having things made so much easier for him like that seemed to make feeling the baby batter spurting out of him and into her not quite so pleasurable. (Then too, he’d only managed to squirt four times instead of five.)

Once Chloe’s top was off, Clara noted with satisfaction, Dan didn’t need to be told to run his hands over her baby sister’s bare chest the same as he’d done with herself; neither did he neglect to get started on working her pajama bottoms down off her little hips, though she noticed with some interest that he didn’t pull her baby sister’s underwear down at the same time the way he’d done when he was stripping herself. Maybe this was for the best, as she noticed waiting for him to get done with those bottoms and start pulling down her baby sister’s unicorn-themed little briefs was kinda exciting. The next time she was trying for a baby with him, she thought, she was definitely going to try to make him take his time with getting her naked in that same way.

By the time all of Chloe’s clothes were off and lying in a heap on the floor at her feet, she was really beginning to enjoy the way Dan’s hands touching various parts of her body and his naked skin pressed against her own was making her feel. All thoughts of kissing being gross had also long since fled from her mind, and she was enjoying the feel of his open mouth pressing into her own a lot too. Everything felt so good that when he suddenly stopped, she felt more than a little disappointed, and tried to wrap as much of her naked body around his as she possibly could in addition to her arms as she turned her searching eyes up to look at him.

“What are you waiting for? Keep going,” said Clara.

“Keep going? What do you mean? That’s everything. She’s naked,” said Dan.

“You know exactly what I mean, Dan,” she said, looking down at Chloe’s exposed little lower lips. “I loved trying for a baby with you; I think that’s the best I’ve ever felt in my life.”

“You mean...” Dan pointed at Chloe, and then back at himself “...with her? A baby?”

“Of course! Chloe, don’t you want to know how good it feels to make a baby?”

“More of this?” Chloe asked, as she clung even tighter to Dan. Clara was sure she heard an edge of excitement in her baby sister’s voice.

“Lots more of that!” she promised. “And then some.”

“Hey, wait a minute!” objected Dan. “What are you talking about? She can’t have a baby: she’s not bleeding yet.”

“So? That don’t mean you can’t try for one with her, just like you did with me,” Clara retorted.

“But it won’t work. She doesn’t have any egg in there for me.”

“Egg? What egg?” asked Chloe.

Clara ignored her. “I might not have an egg in me for you either. You said it yourself; but you put your baby batter in me anyway.”

“Well, yeah: maybe you don’t,” Dan conceded, “but you might. I’m sure she doesn’t. It would be wasted in her.”

“You don’t mind wasting it in me, even though I might have a baby already. Anyway, you said it yourself, too, that it’s fun whether you make a baby or not. Let her do it with you. That’s what she wants... isn’t it, Chloe?”

“His baby batter in me? ’Cause it’s fun? Gimme!”

“But...” With Clara and Chloe double-teaming him, and especially with the latter cuddled up to and draping her naked body all over his, Dan was having trouble thinking straight enough to come up with any objections.

“Come on, Dan, quit stalling!” said Clara, looking down at his boyhood rapidly swelling to its full four inches. “I know you want to put that in her, so just do it!”

Dan hung his head; his body had betrayed him. Even though little Chloe had never caught his eye or inspired any of the kinds of desires and fantasies he’d had about Clara before, now that she was naked, he couldn’t help noticing how pretty the little kindergartner’s body was: smooth and strong and slender and soft in most of the same ways as her sister’s. Looking between her legs in particular, he also couldn’t help but notice she had a bare little mound down there neatly cleaved in two by a little slit with a pair of lips and two little flaps of flesh surrounding it, also nearly a perfect (if somewhat smaller) replica of her sister’s; and he knew without having to be told that it contained all the same inner workings, a firm and yet flexible tunnel of flesh leading up to her little womb, and intended someday (when she did start making eggs) for a long stiff rod of flesh—such as the one currently standing between his own legs—to slide up into it and release a big sticky batch of baby batter—such as he was capable of making—into her to make a baby. “But she’s so small...” was the only objection he could think to make.

“You still got that lubricant, don’t you?” Clara retorted. “She ain’t that much smaller than me. Come on, Dan, get into bed and put Chloe on your lap already! I want her to know just how wonderful it feels to try for a baby, even if she can’t have one yet.”

“I wanna know too!” insisted Chloe.

Somewhere in the back of Dan’s mind, behind all the confusion and excitement clouding it, something was telling him what Clara and Chloe and his own body were egging him on to do was not a good idea; but the powerful desires his raging hormones were stirring up within him at the feel and sight of this cute kindergartner’s smooth and supple naked little body had completely overwhelmed his other instincts. When he opened his arms in invitation to her, she half-climbed and half-leaped up to wrap her legs (and the prize between them) around his waist, making sure to thrust her mouth up into his face for another kiss as she did so. Though she was heavier than she looked and more than he could carry for very long, she was lighter than her big sister and he didn’t have to carry her very far.

When Dan got to the bed, he carefully sat down on the edge with Chloe on his lap, and then scooted back and pivoted on his rump so he’d have all the room he needed to lay himself out straight on the bed with her lying on top the same as he’d done last time. Then he reached for the tube of lubricant in his overnight bag on the floor where he’d left it, only to find that Clara had already gotten it out and was standing there next to the bed handing it to him. Smiling, she squeezed some of it out into the palm of her hand and then wiped it off on his palm to transfer it to him; then she did the same with her little sister, who looked at the blob of lubricant in her hand rather quizzically.

“You wipe that on yourself down there,” Dan explained, making a demonstration of this for her benefit by wiping the blob in his palm off onto his swollen lower head and smearing it up and down all over his shaft until it was covered with the slippery stuff from the tip of his urethra down to where his shaft met his scrotum. Chloe’s cleft was rather different from his protrusion, of course, but she understood well enough to wipe the blob in her hand on her slit and then smear it around a little until it her labia were likewise covered with it. “You might want to get some of that inside you too,” he said, and slipped his hand which still had some lubricant left on it down to dip his fingertips into her and spread the stuff around just inside her entrance.

Chloe giggled a bit at first at the feel of his fingertips prodding slightly into her little opening, which felt a bit like they were tickling her; but then she began to feel something else as his fingers rubbed around a sensitive spot with a tiny little hood of flesh on it up near the top, something really good that made her close her eyes and moan softly. “Mmm... feels good...” she said.

Clara, meanwhile, had put the tube of lubricant away, and was rubbing what remained of the stuff on her hand into her own little opening as she watched these events unfold. By now, the novelty of seeing Dan’s manly parts had worn off and no longer got her so excited; what did get her heart pumping and juices flowing was seeing him stroking her baby sister and remembering just how good having those fingers in herself had made her feel. This was something especially easy to remember when using her own fingers to imitate the way he’d touched her and was now touching Chloe. “That makes you feel good, don’t it?” she said. “You should put your fingers around his baby-maker and make him feel good too.” She stopped fingering herself for a moment and held out her hands as if grabbing a pole to demonstrate how she’d done this with him earlier.

Chloe got the general idea, and curled the little fingers on both her hands around Dan’s enormous (to her) shaft. Copying her big sister’s motions, she stroked them up and down, which made his already swollen member stand up even stiffer and straighter than it already was. “Not... too much... though...” Dan groaned between her quick and yet gentle strokes. “There... really is... such a... thing as... feeling... too good....” The little kindergartner was pushing him close to what he knew from experience to be his point of no return; in the end, he had to lay his own hands on hers to stop her. “Thank you, Chloe... but no more,” he said. “If I feel any better... it won’t be so good for you.” The thought of his baby batter spraying out before it was supposed to and getting all over his chest—or worse, all over her face—and grossing everyone out helped cool him down and bring him back from the brink before it was too late.

“Go on, Dan. Put it in her,” said Clara, who was back to fingering herself now.

“That’s... gonna take some doing,” said Dan, looking down at Chloe’s dangerously tiny entrance and the dangerously long and wide item he was about to slide into it. “I’d better help get you ready.” Leaning in, he started dipping the lubricated fingertips of his one hand into her again while he wrapped his free arm around her and bowed his head to kiss her some more. If she was anything like her big sister, he hoped, the good feelings from all these activities would help loosen and lubricate her down there the way they had Clara.

Chloe wasn’t quite sure what he meant by what he’d said, but she was really liking all of these things Dan was doing to make her feel good. The folds of flesh around that little hole she’d never known was for anything but peeing were puffing up more and more the better she felt, and though something was starting to leak from that hole, she could tell by what she wasn’t smelling that whatever it was, she wasn’t peeing. Though she was sure some of her wet stuff was getting on him, he didn’t get disgusted or yell and throw her off of him or anything like that, so she figured it couldn’t be anything bad.

Dan didn’t want to stop kissing Chloe for even a moment, even though with her beautiful face blocking the view, he couldn’t see quite what was going on below. Closing his eyes, he felt around with those lubricated fingers of his, pushing first two and then three of them at a time into her to get some idea of how much she could take. Though two at a time were a tight squeeze and three were nearly impossible, he had seen how his fingers compared in length and width to his baby-maker at full size, and was sure that the width (most importantly) was somewhere between that of two and three of those fingers; he could just make it fit, probably, if he was careful.

Keeping his lips locked with Chloe’s so she wouldn’t look down, Dan brought his hands down and slid them under her thighs to lift her up on his knees for the final descent. Clara, who could see everything they couldn’t, ceased her fingering and actually started holding her breath when she saw just how big a pillar of flesh and how small an opening were somehow supposed to be coupled together. As the little kindergartner’s tiny cleft slid down toward his lower head, he spread her thighs as wide open as he could to receive him.

Much to the surprise of all three, when Chloe’s split landed on Dan’s glans, it swallowed it immediately and kept on sliding all the way down as far as it could go before it very suddenly stopped, which was at about an inch above his scrotum. She screamed a muffled scream of pain into his mouth and snapped her teeth shut as tears welled up in her eye; it was fortunate for them both that he had never heard of or thought to do anything like French kissing, as her teeth would have swiftly severed any part of his tongue that happened to be extended into her mouth at that moment. Horrified, Clara also began to cry as she turned away and covered her eyes with both hands.

A little blood came trickling out of Chloe’s slit and down Dan’s shaft onto his scrotum as he hooked his arms under hers and held her up in them as much as he could to relieve the sudden weight on the bottom inch of his shaft. In his desire and haste, he had forgotten his mother’s warnings about every girl’s hymen being different, and failed to realize that his not having found one in Clara hardly meant he would not find one in her little sister. In fact, her little sister had the misfortune of having had a septate hymen in her entryway which—however—his penis had now utterly demolished and torn asunder with its rapid plunge deep into her.

Though her screaming had subsided, Chloe was still crying softly when Dan removed his mouth from hers and tried to comfort her by pressing her to his chest instead; however, this only made her cry harder. “Chloe, please...” he whispered. “Don’t cry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It hurts! It hurts!” She cried, none too softly. “Get it out!”

Dan tried to do as she said, but the feel of her internal tightness surrounding his organ had momentarily made it expand even more, such that trying to pull out only established how firmly lodged within her it was while tugging ineffectually at an extremely tender spot and making her cry still harder. “It’s stuck! I can’t—” he said, but before he could say another word, Chloe flew into a panic and started frantically trying to pull herself off of him to no avail. To make matters worse, much as the horror of hearing her high-pitched crying grunts of pain and seeing how hard she winced every time she jerked away from him and failed to separate was killing his emotional desire to complete the act, his body had different plans: every pull against his swollen member only stimulated it more, forcing it past that point of no return he’d felt both times with Clara, but without any of the accompanying pleasure. “Chloe... stop... please....! You’re... making it...” he tried to warn her between tugs, but it was too late.

Dan’s arms around Chloe squeezed tighter, pinning her in place and putting a stop to her tugging against him as several strong—and yet rather thin and not so voluminous—squirts of his remaining baby batter spat forth from him against her tiny cervix. While not quite so obvious a feeling as when he knew he couldn’t stop himself from spurting, some kind of feeling down in his testicles told him they were effectively empty and weren’t going to be be releasing much of anything more for at least a day or so. This, in addition to everything else, was quite the “boner killer” as his friend Jack would have put it: the shaft and head of his thoroughly spent protrusion were already shrinking down in record time compared to each time he’d finished with Clara.

Even as Chloe began calming down upon no longer feeling his member pressing so hard against the raw and bleeding spots inside her, Dan burst into tears, weeping down her back with his head over her shoulder while she sobbed and pressed her face into his shoulder. When Clara finally dared to turn back around and look, she was surprised to see them each trying to comfort each other in their own way as her baby sister wrapped her arms around the boy who’d just hurt her so much; and this with him still inside her, albeit only very loosely. For several minutes, the two of them just sat there and sniffed and sobbed as he told her again and again he was sorry.

After the situation for all three had quieted down almost to the point of embarrassment, Chloe and Dan had to move rather carefully to keep from causing her any more pain as she got up off of him. Her bleeding had stopped and the blood on each of their private parts was starting to get tacky as he fetched several more tissues from his overnight bag to clean them up. After they and Clara besides had wiped away any and all substances that might give away what each of them had been doing this evening, all three retrieved their discarded pajamas and underwear and put them back on in complete silence, exhausted and feeling somewhat ashamed of themselves for the appalling way their encounter had ended.

It was Chloe who finally broke the silence when Dan was going out to the bathroom with all the used tissues to flush them, warning him about the monsters who had chased her out of her room and might still be lurking in the hall. Rather than try to argue with her that monsters didn’t exist, he simply made a bit of a show of looking out the door in both directions and then saying he didn’t see anybody out there. This mollified her worries enough that he was able to get down the hall to the bathroom and back without upsetting her, but she still insisted she was not going back to her room tonight.

In no mood to argue, Clara stated this was fine with her since there was plenty of room on her bunk bed as long as two of them doubled up on one of them. Chloe then suggested she and her big sister take the bottom bunk and let Dan take the top since he was the oldest. Her big sister was having none of this, wanting to snuggle with her lover tonight, and insisted she should bunk with him in the bottom bunk while her baby sister got the top bunk instead; the monsters could hardly get her there, could they? He in turn was still feeling rather bad about how he’d hurt her little sister and wanted to stay with her to comfort her and keep all her fears at bay, while the little sister in question insisted the bottom bunk had been hers before and therefore still ought to be now.

Clara was rather annoyed at Dan for his suggestion and felt like kicking herself for ever having introduced Chloe to their after-hours baby-making activities in the first place, so finally she agreed to take her usual place on the upper bunk and let them be together on the lower one. As some measure of compensation for this, he followed her up the ladder to her bunk to kiss her goodnight once she’d tucked herself in and told her they would sort this matter out at his place tomorrow, winking to hint at what kind of “sorting” they would be doing. Then he tucked in his little bed mate, turned out the light, and slipped in under the covers next to her for some much-needed rest and recuperation.

———————————————————————————————————————

Joe was fast asleep after another lively round of “celebrating” with Francis in the sack, so only she heard the distant moaning and somewhat unsettling crying noises from down the hall. Since she distinctly recognized the voice doing the crying as Chloe’s, she figured her poor baby girl must be having a nightmare. However, she then heard more crying she distinctly recognized as coming from Clara, and indistinct chatter in a rather upset tone from a voice she recognized as Dan’s; what was going on out there?

Then all these noises quieted down, and she could just barely hear a murmur of Clara and Dan’s voices and possibly Chloe’s as well, though she couldn’t tell for certain about that last one; probably just talking in her sleep if that was her, Francis thought, which meant at least she wasn’t having a nightmare anymore. What a day it had been, she thought, as she listened and waited for the last of the distant voices to go silent: if all was going as she’d hoped—despite any hiccups in the plan those noises she’d heard might imply—Clara and Elisa were now no longer virgins; and if things continued to go more or less according to plan, each little girl would soon have a new addition for her family in the making within her. What a shock it would be to both her hubby and her friend’s when they learned they were to be fathers again by being grandfathers, and how angry and upset they would be, but... with a little persuasion and a lot sweet-talking, she was sure in the end they would come to accept the plan as something that had to be done if their families were to continue to the next generation.

Of course, until then, they would have to be kept in the dark about it. Her children being wholly legitimate (not just because they’d been born within wedlock, but also because their firstborn Jack had arrived a full year after their wedding night), Francis had never had to conceal being knocked up before; but she could remember how her just-recently-turned-fifteen sister had managed to hide her bun in the oven from her family for almost four months, even wearing her pads and scratching out a little blood into them to pretend she was still on the rag at the times she was supposed to be. If they could keep their baby girls’ buns in their ovens from being noticed for that long, that should be more than enough to commit their hubbies to staying quiet and seeing the plan through to its completion.

In the meantime, while Joe wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, Francis was sure he’d think there was something awfully fishy about their sleeping arrangements if he caught Dan in Clara’s room or Elisa in Jack’s room tomorrow morning. She’d just have to get the jump on everybody herself and make sure she got up first, which was why she had already set the alarm clock the moment she was sure her hubby was asleep, even though tomorrow wasn’t a workday for him. Having run all her more immediate plans through her head one last time to double-check them, she smiled in satisfaction and drifted off to sleep herself, confident that she had thought of everything that mattered.


	10. Consequences

The next morning, Francis and Joe awoke to the alarm clock’s blaring electronic screech, only for him to cuss and whack the snooze button while complaining incoherently about how he didn’t remember setting it and thought this was his off day before rolling over and going back to sleep. She would have liked to sleep in too, but remembering the importance of concealing what the kids had been doing last night from him gave her a little jolt of renewed wakefulness that got her going. Slipping out of bed, she calmly made her way to the clock and made sure to switch off the alarm for real before throwing on some clothes and going to wake her children.

Francis was rather gratified to discover when she tried to open it that Jack had left the door to his room locked. She rapped lightly with her knuckles, and then a little harder, and then a little harder than that until she heard him complain about the noise. “Breakfast time, boys!” she called out, just in case Joe did happen to be awake enough to hear her. He and his little girlfriend quickly realized why she was talking that way, of course, so it was only he who answered back “Be right there, Ma.”

Coming to Clara’s room next, she suddenly remembered that unlike Jack’s, this bedroom door didn’t have a lock installed. Anyone could have just busted in on the little girl while she was getting busy trying for a baby with her boyfriend; an oversight that would need to be corrected. Francis made a mental note to mention to Joe she was convinced that since her daughter was old enough to have the room to herself now, she should also have a lock installed on her door as one of the privileges of her maturity. In the meantime, she started knocking softly and then louder as before, and called out (before anyone could complain) “Breakfast time, girls!”

In the room, Dan awoke first, heard the knocking, and then had to slap his hand over his mouth to keep from (audibly) freaking out when he remembered the door didn’t have a lock on it to stop anyone from barging in on them and seeing little Chloe here in bed with him. Fortunately, since she was over on the side against the wall and he was over here in the open, he’d be the first to be seen; springing into action, he pulled the covers up over her so she would not be the first one to be seen if anyone did come in. When he heard Francis say “...girls!” he almost panicked, wondering how she could know he had both sisters in here with him until Clara calmly replied “Got it, Ma,” and he realized what the ruse was.

Dan didn’t know what the girls’ mom would have to say if she were to find out Chloe had gotten involved in last night’s activities, but he had a hunch it wouldn’t be anything good. Then it occurred to him where Mrs. Williams was about to go next, and he realized he’d better get ahead of her before she got there. Springing into action again, he leaped to his feet and rushed up to the bedroom door as quickly as he could; and when he got there, he carefully opened the door and tried to make his emergence look as casual as possible, putting a hand over his mouth and letting out a yawn as he did so to put a finishing touch on the ruse.

Spinning around when she heard Clara’s door open, Francis saw Dan emerging into the hallway and immediately ran over to close the door discreetly behind him. Taking him by the shoulders and maneuvering him over to the opposite wall, she hissed softly “Are you crazy? You want your little girlfriend’s father to see you coming out of her room?”

“What, is he out here already?” Dan whispered back, looking around in alarm.

“No, just me... but he could’ve been; that’s the point. You should’ve let her come out first and waited until she gave you the all-clear.”

“Uh, Mrs. Williams, there’s something I gotta tell ya...” Dan whispered, in deliberate imitation of Jack’s mannerisms, knowing his friend’s mom liked him better when he did that.

“What now?”

“Uh... well, you see, Chloe got scared about something and busted in on us last night.”

“She _what_!?” Francis raised her voice perhaps more than she should have.

“Yeah, as the luck would have it, me and Clara were already done, but she scared the crap outta us! Somebody really oughta put a lock on that door.”

Francis lowered her voice “Did she see anything... she shouldn’t?”

Dan had to make a conscious effort not to shuffle his feet or hunch his shoulders or in any other way act too guilty, though he dared not raise his eyes to meet his friend’s mom’s. “Well, I mean, we were lying there in bed together holding each other and stuff, but she already knows how we hug and kiss and that kinda thing.” Both statements were true, he thought, though he’d left out the part about both of them being stark naked and Clara still being on top of him with no covers over either of them to conceal _anything_ Chloe wasn’t supposed to see. “Like I say, I really wish there was a lock on that door so she couldn’t do that.”

He wasn’t sure whether Mrs. Williams was falling for his deflection or not as she took a long time to respond, but in the end she just asked “So why didn’t you send her back?”

Dan raised his eyes; something he always found easier to do when he was mostly telling the full truth “She didn’t wanna go; said there were monsters in her room and they were gonna eat her, so please let her stay with us. So we did.” Looking around as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping, he leaned in and added conspiratorially “Couldn’t try anymore for a baby with Clara after that...” He dropped his eyes again. “...but like I say, we were done anyway.”

As he was waiting another uncomfortably long moment to see whether his friend’s mom was buying his story, Chloe emerged from the room, saw her mama interrogating him, and said “Mama? Dan in trouble?”

The stern look on her mama’s face immediately softened, though she kept the wry smile of a skeptic there. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “We were just talking about how you came to their room and busted in on them without their permission just because you thought you had monsters under your bed.”

“But they was, Mama! One stuck his head up! I stomped him down!”

This claim, Francis found a bit amusing. “Yeah? Then where’s he now?”

“Went back under the bed.”

“So, if I looked, would I find him there now?”

“Not in daytime. Monsters only there at night.”

“Right... How convenient.”

“Mama?”

“Never mind. Well, Chloe, we’ll look again tonight, and you’ll see there are no monsters under there; but what’s important is, you busted in on your sister without knocking. I know that used to be your room too, but it’s not anymore. That’s Clara’s room. Always remember to knock, and to ask her permission before you go in from now on. Got it?”

“Got it, Mama.”

“Good morning, Mama,” said Clara, who’d emerged from her room in the meantime and watched with some amusement as her mama dressed down her baby sister for her intrusion last night.

“Oh, good morning, Clara. Sleep well last night?” said Francis, tipping her a wink.

“Never better, Ma,” she replied, winking back.

“Well, Clara, seems you’re a big girl now. From what I hear—” (here, Francis nodded her approval at Dan) “—I really need to get you a lock for your door.”

“That’s about right, Ma,” Clara agreed.

“Well, good morning, everyone,” said Jack, emerging from his room with Elisa clinging lovingly to his side with both arms around his midsection. “Heh, we gonna be having breakfast here in the hall or something?”

“Good morning, Jack. No, of course we ain’t having breakfast here. You’re right, though: why are we just standing around, everybody? Breakfast is supposed to be at the table.”

As an unspoken rule at the Williams house, Dan had to sit with Jack and Elisa had to sit with Clara and Chloe in a “public” place like this, and all the children had to keep their hands to themselves (i.e. off each other). While Elisa obeyed this rule when she got to the table, she was clearly reluctant to let go of Jack and take her seat across the table from him. It helped that Clara greeted her with a wink and a just barely audible mutter of “Bet you had a great night.”

Francis made and served up a batch of pancakes for breakfast while all the children sat there chatting cheerfully—if somewhat discreetly—about the good times they’d had last night; everyone except Chloe, of course. Her mother felt a bit sorry for her seeing how she was left out like that and tried to strike up a conversation with her to keep her busy, but she sullenly met all her mother’s questions and comments with one-word responses and general noises of agreement or disagreement. Of course, her mother realized, talking to one’s mother was a poor substitute for chatting with one’s friends; especially when the mother in question was skeptical of one’s reports of monsters under the bed.

Joe emerged from his bedroom when breakfast was almost over, and though the children didn’t change their mood, Francis noticed they all went as quiet as Chloe when he arrived at the table. Naturally, they all pretty quickly finished what remained of their breakfast so they could leave the table right away. While she knew they were just keeping their secrets and had nothing against him personally, and though he hardly seemed to notice—or care—about their distancing themselves from him, she couldn’t help feeling a little bad about having to keep him in the dark like this; well, she told herself, it would only be for a few months.

After breakfast, it was time for everyone to get dressed, as Megan would be arriving soon to take her children back home. Realizing it would be a mistake to enter Clara’s room while her father was sitting right where he could see everything taking place in the hall, Dan sidled up to Elisa and discreetly told her “I’ll get your stuff from Jack’s room. You go get mine from Clara’s.” Just as the boy had hoped and expected, Mr. Williams never noticed that they were carrying each other’s overnight bags with each other’s regular clothes in them when he and his sister went into the bathroom together to change; the man wasn’t generally very attentive to mundane details like that.

Joe did raise an eyebrow later that afternoon, however, when Francis was taking the kids over to visit their friends again over at the Williamson house and Chloe didn’t want to go with them. She’d always wanted to go on every visit before, so why not this time? Curiously, his wife also didn’t seem to think there was anything odd about this sudden change in their little girl’s habits, just shrugging and leaving her there with instructions to behave herself and only bug her papa if it was about something important.

That evening when Francis got back with the kids and they all had supper, Joe noticed while Jack and Clara were their usual selves (not too talkative with their parents, but they usually had fun picking on each other), Chloe ate quickly and silently and didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone. As soon as she was done (which was sooner than everyone else), she excused herself simply by flatly reciting the words “Excuse me,” and then left the table and went to her room without another word without even waiting for either of her parents to say she was excused; and her mother didn’t tell her to wait and didn’t even scold her for being rude.

Later that evening, when the kids were all busy with various activities in their room, Joe took Francis aside and asked her about little Chloe’s strange behavior. “She’s just sulking; she’ll get over it,” his wife explained, and proceeded to tell him about the girl’s claims about monsters under her bed and having stomped on one for poking up his head, and how that was why she’d fled to her big sister’s room for refuge last night. She’d be “checking” under her little daughter’s bed tonight just to reassure her they weren’t there, unless he wanted to do it; and speaking of her sister’s room, would he be so nice as to install a lock on its door for Clara’s sake now that she was a big girl?

When Chloe didn’t join her siblings on their visit, Jack immediately went to Elisa’s room with her the moment he arrived and locked the door, and then he and she proceeded to flirt and cuddle and make out with and ultimately make love to each other right there on her bed. Clara likewise went directly to Dan’s room, holed up together with him with the door locked, and went on a wild hugging and kissing spree that ended with him plowing into her naked little body on his bed. Only once they’d sated themselves in this manner and then gotten dressed again did the boys and girls get back together with each other for their usual activities, and even then the little girls shamelessly insisted on sitting on their boyfriends’ laps and cuddling with them at every opportunity.

By the end of the visit, both couples had gotten so hot and bothered from all this physical contact that they’d each had to split up and have Jack and Elisa go back to her room to give each couple the privacy they needed for another roll in the sack. As with Clara and Dan’s first two times the previous night, each couple found a second encounter on the same day was not nearly as much fun as the first, but it did seem to satisfy them for a lot longer. By nightfall, when they were back home in their own bedrooms, neither boy was feeling any need to fantasize and stroke himself for relief; if anything, they were worn out and felt the need to think about something else instead for a while.

That night at bedtime, Francis and Joe both checked quite thoroughly under Chloe’s bed for monsters, even asking her to put her head on the floor so she could watch as they shined their flashlights all around under there and—of course—found no trace of any monsters at all. Then they tucked her in and read her a story and waited to make sure she went to sleep before turning out the lights and slipping away quietly so they wouldn’t wake her. This seemed to work, as she slept peacefully throughout the night and awoke refreshed the next morning with no complaints about monsters under the bed or any other bad dreams.

When Dan and Elisa came over for a visit the next afternoon, however, Chloe went to her room and refused to come out to play with the other children. Since Joe was (as usual) busy with one of his hobbies in his “man cave” in the basement while Francis and Megan approved entirely of their children’s daily efforts at reproduction, the couples were once again each free to couple in Jack and Clara’s bedrooms without interference. (Though the latter room still didn’t have a lock installed on its door yet, the amorous little couple knew nobody was going to be coming knocking this time.) As usual, each couple took to this noble (and highly pleasurable) endeavor with gusto.

So continued the children’s liaisons day after day for an entire week: the two children of one household visiting the other two to tryst with them while Chloe stayed home and stayed in her room and sulked. For all his initial concern about his youngest daughter’s recent change in behavior, Joe’s work and his hobbies provided plenty of distractions, and his wife—much as it stressed her to keep secrets from him—was certainly not encouraging him to focus on what was going on with his children. Francis actually was pretty worried about her youngest daughter’s recent streak of sullen behavior, but she kept putting off doing anything about it, telling herself it was probably just a phase and the kid would soon snap out of it.

Only Clara and Dan suspected the real reason for Chloe’s recent spate of sullen isolation, and only he actually cared enough to want to do anything about it; Clara wanted her boyfriend’s attentions all to herself, and was only too happy to have her baby sister out of her way. When he was all by himself at night, however, the memory of that horrible sexual encounter—absolutely the worst he’d ever had—haunted Dan with guilt. The last several times he had been at her house this past week, he had knocked on Chloe’s door and asked her to let him in, but the door was locked and she was giving him the silent treatment.

Eight days after losing her virginity, Clara was disappointed to discover that despite all her daily efforts with Dan since then, her monthly flow of blood and accompanying crabby mood were occurring right on schedule. Her one rather twisted secret consolation for this was that two days later, Elisa also started bleeding, albeit more lightly than usual and without such terrible cramps as she usually experienced. Their boyfriends were somewhat disappointed too, but since the girls’ not having babies gave them further justification to keep on having all these good times trying for a baby, they weren’t exactly heartbroken over it.

Though they’d visited each other’s houses a lot, the children hadn’t had another sleepover since Chloe’s birthday, and so far they hadn’t made any requests for one: with each boy and girl having sex once or twice a day while visiting or being visited, they didn’t really feel the need for another long overnight stay. However, Dan now asked his mom to let him have a somewhat old-fashioned overnight stay: just for himself, though he wouldn’t object if Elisa wanted to stay over for a slumber party of her own with Clara. Megan ran this request by Francis, and she didn’t see any reason to deny it, so they went ahead and scheduled the sleepover for him.

As he had somewhat anticipated, Elisa wasn’t interested in a slumber party right now, as she would already be getting what she wanted from Jack from her visit with him that day; much as Clara would be getting her satisfaction in bed from Dan long before her own bedtime. Chloe remained sullenly aloof from the other children as before, though come suppertime, she was a bit surprised (and not at all happy) to emerge from her bedroom to find her sister’s boyfriend dining with her family at the table. As on previous days, she ate quickly and then excused herself from the table to go back to her room, presumably to sulk some more.

“Is she always like that?” Dan casually asked her mom, as soon as Chloe left the table.

“Lately, yeah. Don’t know what’s gotten into her,” Francis said. Dan was glad he wasn’t eating or drinking anything just then, as he probably would have choked if he had; as it was, he had to let out a dry cough to conceal the strangled noise his suddenly constricted throat made. “I reckon she’s going through some kind of phase right now,” she continued, “something like how she was when she first started kindergarten before she made any friends there.”

“Yeah, it was kinda like that for me too,” said Dan, and then went back to eating. In truth, he had actually been rather happy to be going to kindergarten at first, only coming to see it as the evil trick to accustom him to having to go to school it was in retrospect; but she didn’t need to know that, of course.

Jack rather expected his friend was planning some extra fun with Clara that night, and so raised an eyebrow when he actually did come to bunk with him in his room that evening after changing into his pajamas. There was always room for him on the bottom bunk, of course, but he hadn’t used it since the last sleepover they’d had here three weeks ago before Chloe’s birthday. On the other hand, his being there did give the boys a chance to catch up on things they’d rather not discuss in front of their girlfriends (such as how well their fantasies about making babies with the girls compared to the real thing), and everybody except Joe knew to expect Dan to sneak out later once everyone had gone to bed.

He did, of course, but not to Clara’s room as they expected. Instead, as soon as Jack got tired of talking and fell asleep, Dan slipped out to go check on Chloe. As he’d learned from keeping his eyes and ears open the last several days, the Williams family rules forbade her to keep her door locked at night; in an emergency (such as the house being on fire), her family needed easy access in case they needed to rescue her.

Creeping up to her door, Dan carefully turned the doorknob slowly and eased the door open so no one would hear him entering her bedroom. To his mild surprise, she wasn’t in there: as his eyes could see by the light of her nightlight, her bed was empty. Turning on the overhead light, he checked in her closet and under her bed just to make sure she wasn’t hiding in the room somewhere.

Could there really be monsters under Chloe’s bed at night after all, and might they have taken her somewhere tonight? Dan briefly entertained the thought—he still did remember how real the monsters under his own bed had seemed, and doubted his own skepticism toward them even now—but dismissed it: as his dad had once said, “Whichever explanation is the most boring is usually the right one.” The most boring explanation for her disappearance was that she had left the room; but where had she gone?

Dan immediately went to the living room and sure enough, there on the couch lay little Chloe, curled up in a ball on one end and shivering in her sleep—obviously from a nightmare, as it was not particularly chilly in there; the room was actually a bit stuffy and warmer than it ought to be. As she groaned in her sleep, he took a seat on the far end of the couch from her and considered what to do. If he awakened her the wrong way, she might be frightened, and then the situation could get ugly.

He decided to try calling out to her first. “Chloe...?” he asked softly, and then again a bit louder when that didn’t work, “Chloe?” Slipping up closer to her, he put his mouth up near her ear and called her name a third time: “Chloe!”

That did the trick: Chloe started from her sleep and her eyes snapped open. When she saw Dan standing over her, she jumped up with a terrified look on her face and scrambled to get away from him for a moment, but when he said “Chloe, it’s me, Dan!” she stopped and looked closer. Seeing the moment she recognized him, he smiled warmly.

“Dan, why you out here?” she asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” he replied. When she gave him a suspicious look, he added “You weren’t in your room. I came looking for you.”

“Monsters in there at night. I sleep out here now,” she explained.

“So I see. So you’re just gonna run away? Let them take your room from you?”

Chloe hung her head. “I’m scared,” she said. “Monsters get me if I go back there.”

“They aren’t there, Chloe. I checked under your bed just now.”

“What about the closet?”

“There too: nobody and nothing.”

“But was with the light on, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Dan admitted, “but—”

“When the lights go off, that’s when the monsters come,” Chloe explained

“I know.” Dan remembered all the times his mom and dad had looked under his bed, and how that never helped once the lights were off and he was alone. “Tell you what, Chloe: let me sleep with you tonight. I’m not scared of any monsters.”

Chloe gave him a suspicious look. “Why with me? You want to do me something like last time?”

There it was: the question Dan had been waiting for. “No, Chloe, not tonight. Not on _any_ night ever again. I’m sorry about that. I really am.”

“My pajamas stay on?”

“Yeah. Mine too. All night.”

“Promise?”

“That’s a promise.”

To his surprise, Chloe extended her arms up to him. “Carry me there?”

“You really want me to?”

“Yeah.”

Shrugging, Dan leaned in and reached out and let her wrap her arms around his neck. Carefully slipping his arms around her and under her backside, he hoisted her up into his arms, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. Strangely enough, though he’d meant what he said when he told her he wasn’t going to try anything like “last time” with her and still meant it now, he did feel himself swelling up down below just a bit at her wrapping herself around him in this way; fortunately, focusing on how far he’d have to carry her and how heavy she was in his arms drove any thoughts of wanting to go back on his word on that far from his mind.

Dark as it was, the little bit of moonlight shining in through the windows helped Dan find his way back to Chloe’s room without having to turn on any lights, and he continued not to do so once he and she were (finally) in her room since he could see well enough by her nightlight. He laid her back on her bed and tucked her in under the covers, and then slid in under them next to her. After a little adjustment (mainly getting her to slide over closer to the wall so there would be room for him), they finally got settled in for the night with him on his back and her head cradled in his arm he’d wrapped loosely around her, while she lay on her side facing him with her one arm draped across his chest.

The monsters came again as soon as he was asleep, and Chloe heard them croaking and growling again in those horrible voices of theirs. “Thinks he’s so tough, does he?” she heard one say. “Long have we waited, and now shall we have him at last!” A roar of approval went up from the others, and to her horror, she saw one of those hideous wrinkly blue-and-green-skinned guys—a different one from the one she’d stomped down before, though she was sure he was one of the same kind—rise up on Dan’s side of the bed and reach out to seize him into his black scaly arms with those long curvy steely blades he had for claws. “Dan, wake up!” she cried, but it was too late: the monster snatched him in his arms and dragged him down over the edge to whatever terrible fate awaited him in the monsters’ world.

“Dan!” she screamed.

“What, what, what!?” she heard Dan saying. Suddenly, there he was next to her again, as if nothing had happened.

“Huh?” Chloe was surprised, to say the least.

“What? What is it, Chloe? Why’d you wake me?”

“I— You were— The monsters came for you!” she said.

Groggy, Dan sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Oh? When was that?”

“Just now!”

“No, they didn’t.”

Chloe looked carefully at Dan: there were no claw marks—not even a scratch—where she’d seen the monster’s steely claws grab him. At the very least, his pajamas should have been torn, but they weren’t. “Was so real!” she said.

“It was just a bad dream, Chloe,” he said. “Everything’s all right now.”

She threw her arms around him and burrowed her face into his chest. “Just a dream,” she acknowledged at last. “I was so worried about you!”

Dan returned her embrace. “I’m okay. Everything’s going to be okay now, Chloe.”

“Stay with me.”

“I will, Chloe, until the morning’s light. It won’t be long now,” he said, looking over at the digital clock on her dresser, which read 5:36 A.M.

There they remained, sitting up snuggling together in each other’s arms until the break of dawn. Chloe and Dan each dozed off a couple of times before then, always being jolted awake when the other shifted a bit. At just a little before 7:00, he kissed her on her forehead (not on her mouth, since that would remind them both of things they preferred not to remember right now) and made his way back to Jack’s room.

Francis and Joe immediately noticed a change in Chloe’s behavior for the better when she showed up at the table along with everyone else for breakfast that morning; before, she’d been turning up late usually just to grab a quick bowl of cereal or some toast right before her online classes began. She was more talkative too, not about much of anything important, but she got to gossiping about what she and her classmates thought of her teacher (mainly that she might be a witch; she was old and ugly and nagged them a lot, and they didn’t like her) when her mama asked her how school was going. She also waved her farewells to Dan alongside Clara and Jack when his mother came to take him back home.

Chloe also insisted on going with her older siblings on their afternoon visit to Dan and Elisa, much to their irritation. With their fifth wheel missing for the past week and more, each couple had gotten used to carrying on shamelessly around the others, seeking privacy for only the most intimate moments of their coupling when the clothes started coming off. Now, though the girls still sat on the boys’ laps and snuggled with them and even did some kissing as before, they felt too uncomfortable to go any further than that even though the little kindergartner was no longer the least bit upset at seeing any of their displays of affection.

If anything, they found her acceptance of their making out so shamelessly in front of her rather creepy, though none of them could figure just exactly why. Clara actually got into a bit of an argument with Dan that day over her feeling rather cheated that he hadn’t slept with her last night, and when Elisa and Jack heard about this, they also got rather curious as to why he hadn’t taken that opportunity. When he revealed how he’d spent the night comforting and protecting Chloe instead, this just ticked off his little girlfriend all the more, and had his little sister and his friend teasing him about his getting a “backup” girlfriend for when his regular one was on the rag and getting snappish toward him.

So the day’s visit ended without any of them getting any satisfaction for the day, and with Clara in particular rather ticked at both Chloe and Dan for having kept her from getting any. The next afternoon at Jack’s house, a similar dynamic began to play out among the five children as yesterday, but this time Clara wasn’t going to let anyone or anything get in her way. Without any trace of shame, she practically ordered Dan to come to her room with her; and because he wanted to keep the peace, he obeyed.

Elisa and Jack initially thought Clara’s aggressiveness and Dan’s capitulation to it pretty funny, but as it dawned on them what was happening between those two right now and was not happening between them, they each gave Chloe a rather frosty look. Then her big brother got the idea to send the little kindergartner to the kitchen to fetch them some snacks; but the minute she was out the door, he shut it and locked it behind her and got busy with his little girlfriend doing some much-needed making up for yesterday’s lost time on his bed. When their fifth wheel duly returned with the snacks she’d been sent to fetch in her hands, she had to wait an awfully long time before he finally opened up and let her in again.

Francis couldn’t help noticing the poor treatment Chloe was getting from the other kids, so she asked Megan for her help in trying to get them to treat the little kindergartner better, and she said she would try. When she talked to Dan in his room that evening, he explained (with as few details about what he had done to precipitate it) the situation to his mom as well as he could: how the others only resented her for getting in the way of their baby-making efforts, and again, he didn’t really have anything against her himself. “I think we could all get along with her just fine if we all had a little private time with each other first, if you know what I mean,” he said.

Megan reported this response back to Francis, and together they came up with a simple new rule for each household: while the mothers kept Chloe entertained and out of the way, each of the couples would be allowed some time to themselves behind locked doors for a single try at making a baby. After that, the new policy would forbid the children to lock any of their bedroom doors until the daily visit was over. As the mothers discreetly explained to each sexually active boy and girl in turn, limiting them to one act a day was probably best for making babies anyway, since doing more than that tended to deplete the boys’ sperm too fast for it to be replenished; and Dan and Jack certainly had to admit they’d noticed a second time in one day tended not to be as much fun as the first, though it left their desires more thoroughly sated.

On the whole, the new policy was a success at improving everybody’s relations, both in the physical and the romantic sense. Since they were only permitted one session in the sack per day, the young couples learned to draw that session out to as much as an hour or more stirring their desires for their partners up into a frenzy before they got to the main event, and then taking some more time to enjoy its aftermath before they got dressed and reopened their bedrooms to Chloe. Clara and Dan in particular quickly patched up their relationship after that, as he helped mitigate her irritable mood swings during her shark week. (Their sessions got a little messier, and Megan had to presoak his bed sheets before washing them, but they all agreed the improvement in his little girlfriend’s disposition was well worth these minor trade-offs.)

A little over a month after Chloe’s sixth birthday, she woke up one morning feeling rather sick and weak. The moment she got to her feet, she felt a rumbling in her stomach and throat and immediately knew she was about to throw up. She raced into the bathroom past Clara (who had just opened the door because she was about to use the toilet herself) and managed to get _most_ of her vomiting of last night’s supper into the toilet bowl (a marked improvement over the last time she’d been this sick at age four, when she’d thrown up all over her blankets).

Needless to say, Chloe didn’t want her breakfast that morning, instead staggering right back to her bed again. Miserable as she felt, she was still able to “attend” her virtual kindergarten classes for the day, where her teacher and classmates expressed their sympathies for her and told her they hoped she’d feel better soon. By lunchtime, she did: enough to eat heartily to make up for missing her breakfast; and by the time her classes were over for the day, she was feeling well enough to join her brother and sister on their visit to the Williamson children as usual. (Just to be on the safe side, in case she had some kind of short-term stomach bug, Francis and Megan kept her with them the entire visit so the other children wouldn’t catch it.)

The day’s crisis seemingly at an end, Chloe easily cleaned off her plate while sitting with her family at their supper that night, and Joe wasn’t even aware she’d been sick earlier that day until Francis told him about it. “Eh, probably one of them twenty-four-hour stomach bugs,” he said, “except it didn’t even last that long.” All the same, just to be on the safe side again, they had their little daughter stay in her room by herself the rest of the evening until bedtime.

The next morning, Chloe woke up sick and had to make a run to the bathroom to lose her supper in the toilet bowl again; at least this time, only a tiny bit of it that slopped over the side of the bowl ended up on the floor, and it took no more than one wet paper towel to wipe the floor clean. Once again, she ate no breakfast but was well enough for her virtual classes; and as before, her nausea was gone by lunchtime and her weakness by the time Dan and Elisa paid their visit. At supper that night, Francis served her only half a portion as a precaution, though she would gladly have eaten a full portion had she been allowed.

The next morning, that half-portion also ended up in the toilet, with minimal slopping this time. At Joe’s recommendation, Francis made an appointment with the family doctor for after the school day, and took Chloe to it immediately after dropping off her other children with Megan at her house. The doctor, after running a few basic checks (like taking her pulse and checking her temperature), diagnosed her disease as the tag-end of a particularly nasty strain of norovirus that had been making the rounds this past winter: it could last a whole week, and had a way of going dormant during the day, thereby deceiving those who had it into thinking they were over it... until they got sick again the next morning.

For treatment, he gave Francis a prescription for some anti-nausea pills, but told her to try some common over-the-counter medicines before filling it; the prescription drug was expensive, and he wasn’t sure how much of it her insurance plan would cover. He also recommended that Chloe drink plenty of fluids and get plenty of rest, and (of course) eat a light diet of foods she could easily digest such as rice, bread, soup, and pasta; preferably earlier in the day, and in small hourly portions like snacks instead of as full meals. Beyond that, he said they should only call him again if the symptoms persisted longer than another four days.

When Francis picked up Clara and Jack again on her way home, she learned something a bit unsettling from them: Elisa had also been sick and thrown up her previous night’s dinner this morning, but was also feeling fine by the time they paid their daily visit. Apparently, despite the mothers’ precautions, she had caught the norovirus as well. This left them with the problematic question of whether they should take the risk of continuing to visit each other to continue trying for babies.

When Francis called Megan that night after dinner to compare notes and make plans, however, her friend asked her to come visit her in person instead so they could talk in private. When she got there, her friend then got in the car and told her to drive them some distance away down any road where they could find a spot to pull over where no one would be likely to observe them. While she couldn’t help thinking her friend was being quite the drama queen about their need for secrecy, the place she chose was a spot miles away from the nearest dwelling in a huge plowed field which—by that night’s bright moonlight—would allow them to see any potential spies approaching long before these hypothetical spies would see them; a choice her friend fully approved.

“Now, what was so all-fired important about that ‘norovirus’—or whatever that thing our baby girls have got is called—that we had to be out here to talk about it?” asked Francis.

“Well, first of all, it’s not a norovirus,” said Megan, as she turned and looked in every direction just to make sure no one was approaching; there was neither a car on the road nor any shape she could interpret to be a human silhouette.

“It ain’t? How do ya figure?”

Megan reached into her purse. “Good news, I think,” she said, and took out a little plastic stick Francis recognized as a home pregnancy test. The reading on it was positive. “It’s morning sickness. I’d say your boy Jack has done a man’s duty,” she declared, softly and yet triumphantly.

If eyes could pop out of a head like she’d seen in old cartoons, Francis figured hers would have. “What!?” she exclaimed. “But... she had her monthly days on the rag just a month ago!”

“I thought about that myself, but you know what? I should have known something was off about it. She was having horrible cramps before, but this time she hardly complained about them at all. Her other periods before that lasted about a week, but she barely bled three days this time. Her blood was bright scarlet those other times, but this time the blood was a rather pale and diluted pinkish color. Now that I’ve looked it up online, I’m thinking that was no period; it was a bit of implantation bleeding.”

“Say what?”

“You know: when a fertilized egg implants on the uterine wall, sometimes it causes some bleeding. It’s not incredibly common, but far from unheard-of either. Since implantation’s likely to be right around a time a girl’s expecting her period, it’s easy to get it mixed up with that if you don’t know the difference.”

“Well, I’ll be danged!” Francis scratched her head. “Ain’t never happened to me in all the three times I had a baby.”

“Me either; but it’s happened to Elisa. That means she’s probably about a month pregnant by my reckoning, which means—”

“She might’ve caught her very first time; ‘a man’s duty’ indeed!” said Francis. She could hardly keep from grinning in triumph. “Congratulations, Meg!”

“Well, thank you, Francis; but there’s something else we needed to discuss.” Now Megan reached into her purse again and pulled out another home pregnancy test just like the first one, but still in its unopened box. “This one’s for Chloe.”

Francis widened her eyes. “Meg, you’re not suggesting—?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Let me get this straight: you’re telling me you think my Chloe—?”

“Yes, that’s what I think.” Francis searched her friend’s stern face for any sign she was trying to keep it straight, but saw absolutely none.

“Meg, how can you say that? How can you be so sure?”

“I’m not. That’s why I’m giving you this. It’s a cheap test I got at a dollar store, so not the most accurate in the world, but I think it’d be pretty accurate for any girl whose period is late by a week or more; like—say—my Elisa?”

“Are you saying you think your boy Dan... could’ve...?”

“Well, I’m fairly certain it wasn’t your boy Jack. His little sisters don’t seem to appeal to him, any more than Dan would want to try anything with Elisa.”

The full implications of Megan’s statement were beginning to sink in for Francis “You’re accusing your own boy of knocking her up, Meg: your own flesh-and-blood son! You’re telling me if she _did_ happen to be in a family way...”

“If she _does_ happen to be ‘in a family way’ as you put it, yes: it probably happened on the night of her sixth birthday. That’s when something changed in her behavior, wasn’t it? She didn’t want to come to my house with her siblings, and when my children were at her house, she didn’t want to come out of her room even to play with her friend Elisa.”

“She didn’t want to come out of her room at all, except to eat,” said Francis. “If she was so scared of Dan, or if she hated him for something he’d done to her, I’d reckon...” After a long pause, she still couldn’t quite seem to finish the thought.

“What would you reckon?” Megan prompted.

“Well, I reckon she’d only be like that when she knew he was going to be around her; but she was that way all the time.”

“Every child is different, Francis; and though the shrinks don’t like to admit it, things the law considers sexual abuse aren’t always as clear-cut as the people who make those laws like to pretend they are. I thought it rather strange when Dan asked me to let him have a sleepover with Jack, even if Elisa wasn’t going with him, and I thought it even stranger when I heard he didn’t sleep with Clara that night as we all thought he would.”

“Yeah, that struck me odd too... but that was when Chloe snapped out of it, and she was hanging with the others again. Sure ain’t what I’d expect of a girl if a guy who raped her came to call on her again.”

“Well, that’s what I’m saying: maybe she didn’t see it as rape. Maybe he didn’t either. It’s even still possible I’ve got this all wrong and he did _nothing_ to her, and she’s just got some kind of norovirus, not morning sickness.”

“Though that ain’t how I’d bet.”

“Exactly. Dan never told me exactly what happened to make Chloe join the gang again, but I heard them teasing him about her being a ‘backup’ for whenever Clara didn’t want to do the deed with him. He was getting pretty hot and flustered, saying it wasn’t like that at all and he was just keeping her safe from the monsters under her bed, but they weren’t buying his explanation.”

“Come to think of it,” Francis said, fidgeting with the box with the home pregnancy test in it and absentmindedly turning it over in her hand, “seems to me whatever happened, Clara’s gotta have been in on it too. Dan was in her room that next morning, and Chloe was in there with both of them. I ended up running a rabbit trail and never got back on track to ask him everything I meant to, but he was saying something about monsters under Chloe’s bed too, and that were her reason for being there.”

“Did you ask him when exactly she walked in on them?”

“Yeah, and he said lucky for them, they were already done with the baby-making by then. I asked him if she saw anything she shouldn’t, and he just said something about hugs and kisses and how she already saw them doing that before.”

“That doesn’t really sound like an answer to me.”

“Like I say, I got to running a rabbit trail. He kept saying we needed a lock on that door—which we did—and then talking about the monsters, and then Chloe was there talking about them too, and then Clara and Jack and Elisa were all out there in the hall, and I just didn’t have the time to get back around to asking him the rest. The way Chloe kept going on about monsters under her bed, though, I reckoned she just had a grudge against us for not believing her. It’s not like she ever talked about anything else.”

“Hm,” muttered Megan. “You know, I’m thinking the betting odds for there being some perfectly innocent explanation for all this just went up a little bit. I mean it, though: you really should test Chloe to see if she’s pregnant. We both know at this point there aren’t many Snow Whites left in her class, and a lot of the Rose Reds are younger than she is.”

“I’ll look into it the moment I get home.”

The stern expression on Megan’s face got even sterner. “If it turns out she is pregnant, Dan owes us one heck of an explanation...”

“Likewise Clara, don’t forget.”

“We’ll have the story from them yet, and it had better be a good one.”

“If it ain’t, they sure as heck gonna wish they’d never been born. I think we can each take care of our own when it comes down to what they deserve, can’t we?”

“Yes, and depending on who’s to blame, I think we can make the punishment mutual.”

“Right. Let’s be on our way home now.”

As promised, Francis had Chloe take the home pregnancy test that very night, and within five minutes, it showed a positive result. The little kindergartner saw the way her mama’s eyes arched with silent fury and cringed in fear, thinking she must have done something wrong and her mama was about to give her the spanking of her life for it, but then she just told her to keep getting ready for bed instead. Seeing her mama was still angry about something, she made sure to do everything exactly right, and go promptly to bed without any of her usual fussing about wanting to stay up a little longer.

The next day, Francis paid a visit to Megan again while the children were in their online classes and showed her Chloe’s home pregnancy test. They quickly made their plans, and then that afternoon, they each made all their children get in their cars with them for a “field trip” out to their agreed-upon meeting place in the parking lot of a long-abandoned former gas station on a lonely and little-traveled stretch of country road. When all five children were comfortably seated in a circle in the shade under the station’s metal canopy, the mothers each stood up and told their children they had some announcements to make.

“First, Jack,” Megan announced, “we want you to know that Elisa is pregnant with your baby; and by our estimates, she has been for about a month. Congratulations: we will be proud to present the boy or girl you two have made together to her father Jim as your contribution to our family.”

Jack and Elisa were both pleasantly surprised to hear this news, especially when Dan and Clara and even Chloe joined in congratulating them with backslapping and hugs and high fives and shaking of hands. Megan stood and watched with a smile on her face, but her heart sinking within as she waited for the congratulatory chatter and noise to cease. Francis, on the other hand, waited with a wry smirk and her eyebrows arched with silent fury the same as they’d been the night before.

“Next, Dan,” said Francis, as soon as the children were quiet and all eyes were on their mothers again, “we’d like you to know that we just found out Chloe is in a family way with your baby, though Clara is not. I’m sure my Joe will be grateful for your contributing to our family—just as soon as he gets over his shock and fury and a personal desire to hang you from the nearest tree for knocking up his little baby girl on her sixth birthday!”

Jack turned to Dan and yelled “Whiskey-tango-foxtrot, man!? When I said she was your backup, I was just yanking ya! I didn’t seriously mean it!”

Elisa turned to Chloe. “You’re pregnant too?” she asked.

Chloe sat there in a daze, not knowing what to think. “Dan’s... baby?” she murmured.

Clara tackled Dan and tried to wrap her stubby eight-year-old fingers around his eleven-year-old neck with considerably less of an effective result than she’d hoped. “You put a baby in her before she ever went on the rag, but you couldn’t put one in me!?” she was all but screaming.

Suddenly, Clara felt her mother’s big calloused hands grabbing her shirt by the back of its collar and hauling her off of Dan. “Not so fast, Clara! You ain’t gonna beat the rap for your part in this so easy,” said Francis. “You were there too that night, and you ain’t gonna tell me you had nothing to do with it!”

“Wh— Ma?” said Jack. He was rather surprised to see his mother restraining Clara from doing to Dan what he had half a mind to do himself, and it took a moment for him to process what she’d just said. When he did, he said “Clara!? What are you talking about, Ma?”

Megan had the sternest look on her face either of her children had ever seen, but she was far more measured and restrained than any of the others in her anger. “Dan,” she ordered, “come here.”

As he tried to roll up off his back, Dan thought what he was feeling right now must be something like how having a heart attack felt: his heart had just done a major plunge, and then it started hammering away at his rib cage while he felt a combination of “pins and needles” and a bizarre numbness running up his spine. Then he heard his mother’s order, and replied “Mom?”

“I said come here, Dan,” Megan repeated.

Dan was to be reminded almost constantly that afternoon of the lesson he’d first learned back when his mom had presented him with the proof that she knew of his secret sessions of self-stimulation: you can’t really die of embarrassment, though you might wish you could. He stood up ever so slowly on his feet and forced them to walk him over to his mom, knowing full well he faced some terrible humiliation beyond what he’d already suffered. Well, if that was the price he had to pay for what he’d done to Chloe, so be it; ashamed and yet angry at his exposure, he held his head up as if in defiance of the whole world as he stepped forward.

His mom directed him to turn around and face the other children, and all eyes were upon him, as if he were a criminal about to be executed and they the spectators at his execution. “Dan, we know that you knocked up Chloe on the night of her sixth birthday because that was the only time a month ago you could have been with her and out of our sight,” Francis declared in an even tone like a lawyer making an opening statement at a trial, “and yet, she wasn’t all alone with you, was she? Clara, here, was with you too—wasn’t she?”

Suddenly, Jack, Elisa, and Chloe shifted their eyes to Clara, who was angrily squirming in her mama’s grasp. “Let me go!” she whined. “It’s not my fault he knocked her up!”

“Clara,” Francis declared in her angriest tone below a yell, “sit down right now, and no moving from this spot. You’ll get to tell your side of the story too, but it’s Dan’s turn now.” Clara begrudgingly did as she was told, continuing to glare daggers at her partner in crime from her seat on the cracked and worn tarmac. “Well, Dan? What happened that night? Your friend and your sister and your mama and me are just dying to know,” said Francis only half-sarcastically.

Dan looked to his mom, but Megan just nodded solemnly and silently at him to go ahead. “Uh...” he glanced quickly from Jack to Elisa to Chloe, took a gulp of breath, and tried to think of a way to start. “Well, I guess it all started when Chloe came barging in on me and Clara,” he said. “She was crying about monsters under her bed, saying they were after her. We had just tried for a baby again for the second time, so we were both naked, and Clara... Uh... She was, um... on top of me... with, um... me still in her.”

Everybody cringed at hearing this admission from him, including Dan himself, and he couldn’t help wondering: had he really needed to say that? Seeing the others embarrassed for him too, however, gave him a strange kind of confidence that loosened his tongue. So he proceeded to tell the whole sordid story—without sparing Francis any of the details he’d held back from her before—of how the night he had one of the very best experiences of his life came to be the night he also had one of his very worst: how Clara had teased and taunted Chloe into giving him those big sloppy kisses, and talked him into stripping her little sister naked as part of convincing her to keep quiet about what she’d seen; how she had then cajoled her little sister into wanting to try for a baby with him, the way she said the big girls (such as herself) did; how she had overcome each of his objections to this through appealing to both his desires and those of her little sister; and of that horrible moment when he realized how badly he was hurting the little six-year-old, and yet couldn’t pull out until he’d spurted the last few spurts of his baby batter in her; and finally, he told of the miserable aftermath in which he tried to clean up after himself and undo some of the hurt he’d done to her by giving her the refuge she wanted from those monsters under her bed.

All through this recounting, Clara had been glaring and grumbling, and her mama had repeatedly had to remind her to hold her tongue and let Dan finish his side of the story. When he came more or less to a conclusion, Francis asked him only about that sleepover a little over a week later in which he’d somehow brought Chloe back to being almost the same as she’d been before. He simply told of his guilt over what had happened, and wanting to make things right between them, and how he’d apparently more or less achieved this by staying with her that night to protect her from the monsters in her nightmares.

“Well, Dan,” Megan said, “you make yourself sound like a pretty nice guy. Sit down now, son. It’s time we heard your girlfriend’s side of the story.” Dan did as ordered, and though his mom hadn’t specifically ordered him to sit right where he was, he figured she wanted him to do the same as Clara’s mom was making her do; so he sat down right where he was. “Clara,” she continued, “you don’t seem to agree. It’s your turn now: don’t be shy. Tell us what _you_ say really happened.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt her either!” declared Clara. “I didn’t mean to have her there at all. It’s all because _somebody_ didn’t make it so I could lock her out.”

Believing she had just made a telling point, Clara confidently proceeded to tell her side of the story. She’d been having the best time ever in her life with Dan, she said, when Chloe came busting in on them. Despite her mama’s warnings, the first two times they tried for a baby had caused her no pain at all, only minor discomforts amid more pleasure than she had ever known to be possible.

When her baby sister turned up crying about monsters under her bed, she hadn’t been trying to do anything more initially than calm her down and comfort her just like Dan was doing, she said. It was because Chloe quickly got distracted from her fright by noticing their nakedness and what they had been doing together that Clara got the idea to share the incredible pleasure her boyfriend had just given her with her baby sister as well. The little kindergartner’s sixth birthday had already given everybody such a great time, so why shouldn’t she also get to have one more birthday gift in the form of finding out how good it felt to try for a baby?

True, Clara admitted, she had teased and taunted her baby sister into doing all that kissing with Dan as he’d said; and yes, she had partially talked him into stripping Chloe naked by saying this would keep her from snitching to her papa about what she had seen them doing as he’d also recounted. However, could anyone deny such dares and demonstrations were how she’d gotten them all introduced to the pleasures of kissing in the first place back when it still seemed “gross” to them? Also, if her boyfriend was having such misgivings about doing things like this with her baby sister as he had just been telling them, why while he was stripping her had he taken with such relish to groping and stroking her bare flesh without anyone having to tell him to do so?

Yes, Clara admitted she had also cajoled and pressured her boyfriend and baby sister into doing that “practice” coupling session that ended in such disaster for them (and had ultimately proved to be more fruitful than any of them had expected). She reiterated each of the objections Dan had made and her responses to them, and then asked: had any of her arguments been wrong? Did Jack really want to stop squirting Elisa full of his baby batter now that he had succeeded at putting a baby in her, and did his little girlfriend—only one year older than Chloe, need they be reminded—want him to stop either?

Finally, she reminded them, how could she have known lending her boyfriend to Chloe as an extra birthday gift was going to end in such a fiasco? She’d been every bit as appalled and horrified as Dan had at all the unexpected blood and pain and tears. So sorry was she for how her boyfriend had hurt her baby sister so badly that she had generously given up snuggling with him throughout the night as she had been planning so he could comfort that poor injured little baby sister of hers instead, even though she’d never had any business being in the room with them in the first place; and for all the times they’d been to bed with each other since, Clara had never yet gotten her chance to _sleep_ with him the way she wanted, even during his most recent sleepover at her house.

When she was finished with her account, the children and their mothers were all rather appalled and horrified, albeit for different reasons and with different levels of sympathy for each of the incident’s participants. Dan was starting to feel maybe he did owe his little girlfriend more attention than to her desires than he’d been giving her; Jack was wavering in his opinion of how well his best friend had treated each of his baby sisters; and Elisa had a lot of sympathy for both her brother and each of the sisters in turn. As for Francis and Megan, they were a bit ashamed for their oversight which Clara had so pointedly reminded them was partially to blame for Chloe’s having gotten into this situation in the first place, but they couldn’t help noticing a lot of her side of the story seemed to consist of some rather self-serving rationalizations.

To get the full perspective, her mama now asked Chloe to step forward and explain from her own perspective each of the stories they’d just heard. Since she was just six years old and not so skilled at telling a story in its entirety on her own, Francis and Megan both had to coach her through each part of it by asking her a series of questions almost like a couple of lawyers; though any actual lawyers in an actual court would have raised numerous objections about how loaded and leading many of their questions were. Since this was the mothers’ informal inquiry into what their children had been doing rather than an actual jury trial, however, everybody considered her side of the story—regardless of how they’d gotten it from her—to be just as valid as Clara’s and Dan’s.

With some prompting, Chloe began by speaking once more of the monsters under her bed and how very real they had been to her; of the horrible things she’d heard them saying, and of that terrifying moment when one of them popped his head up between her mattress and the wall from down there. Though she’d stomped him back down again, if the monsters weren’t going to stay down there, she obviously wasn’t safe from them in her bed or anywhere else in her room. Naturally, she’d leaped as far from her bed as she could before opening the door and fleeing her room—and she’d been in such abject terror at the time, she hadn’t even closed the door behind her before fleeing down the hall; in retrospect, she wasn’t sure it would have stopped them even if she had.

Since she knew her mama and papa and big brother typically locked their doors at night, the only place Chloe could think to run for refuge was to her big sister’s room which didn’t have a lock on its door. She’d expected, of course, that Clara would be annoyed with her for returning there; but she’d also expected her friend Elisa would be staying there tonight, and she would help talk her big sister into letting her stay. Needless to say, seeing Dan lying there in bed with her big sister—both naked, and with her big sister lying on top of him—was a bit of a shock; but in some ways, she actually felt a bit safer having him there, as he was bigger and stronger than her friend and sister and could put up a much better fight against any of the monsters pursuing her.

Of course, once he’d shut the door against the monsters and she felt relatively safe (not only because he was so big and strong, but also because she believed the monsters wouldn’t show themselves to anyone who didn’t believe in them—as he didn’t—to keep all her potential protectors skeptical of her complaints and warnings), that was when she truly began to notice his nudity and her big sister’s, and to get curious about it. That was when Clara, of course, started talking Chloe into hugging and kissing and getting naked and groping and trying to make a baby with Dan—which, up until that last step, had actually felt really good just as her big sister said it would. She also brought up a certain detail about the painful ending to her first sexual experience which both he and her big sister had somehow neglected to mention: how when she was crying from the pain, he had started crying too while apologizing profusely for hurting her.

The more of her testimony Francis and Megan heard, in fact, the better Chloe made Dan’s treatment of her seem. She’d kept quiet about the whole incident until now in part because of the promise he and Clara had extracted from her and how embarrassing it would be to admit she had also been naked with him, but also in part because of how neither her mama nor her papa nor anybody else ever seemed to want to listen to or believe her about those monsters under her bed. She’d sullenly shut herself up in her room and refused to visit with the other children not because she hated or was afraid of him—though she couldn’t just forgive and forget how badly he’d hurt her and get over it and move on with her life so easily—but because she knew now what was going on between him and her big sister as well as her friend Elisa and her brother Jack, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

To make matters worse, the monsters under her bed had continued to terrorize her at night as they openly mocked her and told her nobody would ever believe her until it was too late and they’d already taken her away. They constantly reminded her she couldn’t stay awake all the time every night, and threatened that some dark night when she fell asleep, she would wake up to find herself lost and surrounded by her tormentors in their horrible monster kingdom “far from any land of the living!” When she started sneaking out after her bedtime to sleep on the couch in the living room, even then they would taunt her that she could run and hide all she liked, but they would come after her there too sooner or later.

It was when Dan had his sleepover with Jack that this miserable nightly nightmare finally came to an end, for it was he rather than the monsters who came to find Chloe on her couch. It was she rather than her big sister with whom he’d slept that night, and his being there to protect her was what had broken their power over her. She spoke of her awakening from seeing one of them carry him off only to find him still lying there with her, safe and sound, and how she then came to realize the monsters only had the power to make her _think_ something was happening that really wasn’t; the reason they threatened her so much and yet never did what they said they were going to do to her was because they couldn’t: they could only make her _think_ they were capable of such things, and now they couldn’t even do that.

The mothers and other children all found Chloe’s story very moving, and Francis asked her only one further question: now that she knew she was carrying Dan’s baby from the way he’d hurt her, did she still feel the same way about him as her protector? After thinking about this for a moment, she replied that she knew he hadn’t meant to hurt her, and had actually been trying to make her feel really good; and now that he’d rescued her from that horrible nightmare, she was rather proud to have his baby growing inside her. Megan was so touched to hear this that she had to raise her eyes and put on her best poker face to keep her tears confined; then she had to cough and discreetly get a tissue from her purse to wipe her runny nose.

“Thank you for telling us that, Chloe,” said Francis. “I think your papa will be proud of you and your baby with Dan when we tell him about it; but don’t breathe a word to him about it until then.” She turned to the other children. “That goes for all of you; not a word to your papas about these babies until we say you can, understand? We don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

Each of the children renewed this promise to his and her mother in his and her own way.

Megan blew her nose and composed herself. “Well, now that we’ve heard the story, I say each of us should decide what to do with her own child. You go first, Francis.”

“Indeed,” said Francis, giving her older daughter a stern look like a judge about to pass sentence. “On your feet, Clara.”

As if to play her appointed role, Clara stood solemnly to her feet. “Yes, Mama?”

“Clara,” declared Francis, “while I might say I can see how your intentions were good in wanting to share the pleasure Dan brought to you with your baby sister, it remains that what you talked them into doing has disrupted our plans and complicated them and made a lot of things very difficult for us. You had no business teaching your baby sister how to make babies before she’d even gone from being a Snow White to a Rose Red. For your part in this whole sorry affair, therefore, I am grounding you for a month.”

“Grounding? But Ma...!”

“No ifs, ands, or buts, Clara. You are to stay in your room at all times except bathtimes and mealtimes. You are not to leave the house without my permission; and I can promise you ain’t gonna get that permission unless you got a real killer of a reason, which I don’t think you ever will.”

Clara’s face drooped sadly as she looked over at her boyfriend. “But... what about... you know... with Dan?”

“I’d say that’s for Meg to decide. How about it, Meg?”

“Stand up, Dan,” Megan solemnly instructed.

“Yes, Mom.” Dan rose to his feet, his face already drooping. He’d already seen a few courtroom drama movies in his time, and knew how this scene worked: the judge always ordered the guilty defendant to rise to his feet when passing sentence.

“For your complete honesty and courage to confess the whole truth, Dan, I dare say you are quite commendable,” Megan declared, and he raised his eyes with a glimmer of hope in them for just a moment. “However—” she continued, and the glimmer was immediately snuffed, “—you have also played a part in disrupting our plans and complicating them and making life more difficult for us. You admitted that for just a moment, you realized it was a bad idea to play at making a baby with little Chloe even though she and you were just pretending, but you gave in to temptation and the pressures from her and from your girlfriend and did the deed anyway. That you made a commendable and mostly effective effort to undo the damage you’d done to her does not change the reality that you have impregnated a little six-year-old before she could even have her first period. You should have listened to your instincts more carefully, Dan.”

Dan bowed his head in contrition. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

“I know you are, but being sorry for what you’ve done is not going to fix anything. Since you have disappointed us and made life more difficult for us, you must likewise learn to live with difficulty and disappointment. As such, you are also grounded for a month. You likewise are not to leave your room except for baths and meals, and not to leave the house at all unless I grant you permission.”

Dan looked over at his girlfriend. “But Clara’s not pregnant yet. How...?”

“Indeed, our plan was originally for Clara to have a baby to present to her father at nearly the same time as Elisa was presenting her baby to yours; but now, you and your little girlfriend are just going to have to put off trying to make one for a month. May these consequences for your recklessness be a lesson to you both.”

“Well, children, it’s time for us to be getting home,” said Francis, dismissing the meeting with a wave of her hand. “Clara, honey, if you got anything to say to your boyfriend, I think you better say it now. You ain’t gonna be seeing him for a while.”

“Dan, that goes for you too,” said Megan. “If I were you, I’d take this opportunity to kiss her goodbye.” Leaning over to Francis, she said “I think we should give these two lovebirds a few minutes to themselves before we go, don’t you?” The mothers nodded their agreement, and made their way back to their cars. As the implications of their punishments began to sink in, Clara started crying while Dan was rendered nearly speechless. Jack and Elisa stopped by to try to cheer their friends up.

“Tough break, man,” said Jack, slapping Dan on the back. “I guess it’s kinda fair for what you did to Chloe, but if I couldn’t see Elisa for a month...? Dang.”

“Gee, thanks, Jack,” grumbled a rather sardonic Dan. “Sorry for knocking up your _other_ little sister.”

“I guess from what she said, that wasn’t all a one-way thing, but... Dang, man! She’s still in kindergarten!”

“So was Elisa, last year.”

“Yeah, man, I know. Look, I’ll come visit you in your cell—um, your room—while I’m visiting her... and when Elisa’s not visiting me, if you know what I mean. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go talk to your ma about something. You go give Clara a kiss for me, okay?”

“Thanks again, Jack.”

“See you in a day or two, man.”

When Dan went to kiss Clara goodbye, he found her weeping on Elisa’s shoulder as she tried to comfort her. “I’ll help you pass notes to him if you want,” his sister was saying.

“Thanks, Elisa... for everything. I might even do that,” said Clara between sobs.

“Hey, kid,” said Dan to Elisa, “You can talk to my girlfriend later. I can’t. Why don’t you go do your kissing up to Jack?”

Elisa stuck out her tongue at him. “I’ll get to see him again later too,” she said, but then she said “See you soon, Clara” to her friend and then left her alone with him as he’d requested.

As Megan watched Dan embracing his little girlfriend and saying something that made her cry harder, but also had her chewing on his lips for one heck of a goodbye kiss a minute or so later, Jack sidled up to her and said “Uh, Mrs. Williamson, there was something I wanted to ask ya...”

“Fire away,” she said.

“Well, it’s about me and Elisa, you know? I mean, now she’s got one on the way, I know we don’t need to try for a baby anymore, but...”

“But you’d still like to do it with her anyway?”

“With your permission, ma’am?”

“I’ll tell you something you’ll never read in Dan’s sex education books, Jack: sex helps a girl with making babies in more ways than just getting her pregnant. For example, it just might help Elisa with that morning sickness she’s got right now.”

“So... would that be a yes?”

“Of course it would, Jack. Just try not to remind Dan too much what he’ll be missing this next month.”

“I won’t. Thank you, ma’am.”

“You’re welcome.”

The delay to Clara and Dan’s month-long parting soon came to an end, and their mothers almost had to drag the two apart from their last kiss, but in the end they each held their heads up high as they got in their mothers’ cars to go home to be grounded. Since this was Elisa’s day to visit Jack, she rode with Clara and Chloe in the back seat of their mom’s car while Jack rode up front. Francis and Megan had to inform their husbands of Clara and Dan’s respective grounding when they got home, officially for prank calling a strip club in her case and for being caught with a shoplifted dirty magazine in his if either husband asked for details—which neither of them did, however (having long ago given their wives a free hand in applying any non-physical kind of discipline).

The punishment did fit their crime rather well: after getting so much pleasure from taking each other to bed, Clara and Dan’s woes at not being allowed to visit each other anymore were rather similar to the withdrawal symptoms of a psychological addict denied his fix. He still knew all his old self-stimulation techniques to apply while remembering all the fun he’d had trying to make a baby with her in order to help ease his suffering, and she was likewise starting to learn a few ways to stimulate herself while remembering her baby-making attempts with him, but even the best memories and techniques were proving to be a poor substitute for the real thing. For an eight-year-old girl and eleven-year-old boy, a month felt like a very long time indeed; and their mothers made clear in the meantime that both their sentences would be extended if either of them got caught trying to sneak out to meet the other in person.

Elisa’s daily lovemaking with Jack did seem to ease her morning sickness, though maybe not so much because there was anything magical about his baby batter as because of how great he made her feel while infusing her with it; the over-the-counter anti-nausea medicine Megan gave her and some subtle changes her mommy had made to her diet on the advice of certain online articles about dealing with morning sickness might have had something to do with those improvements too. Chloe didn’t get to have as many of these remedies and Francis couldn’t keep coming up with excuses for why her daughter was still getting sick in the morning long after that nasty norovirus strain her doctor had misdiagnosed should have run its course, so she helped her daughter cover it up instead by giving her a puke bucket she could easily conceal and discreetly empty out later and “letting the kids sleep in” every morning instead of insisting they be at the breakfast table. Since Jack was sometimes lazy and Clara often spent mornings sulking over her grounding instead of taking the opportunity to be out of her room, the perpetual absence of their baby sister was not as conspicuous as it otherwise might have been.

Chloe very willingly continued to tag along with Francis and Jack on their visits to the Williamson household, and quite often while her brother was busy getting all naked and sweaty with and pumping Elisa full of another helping of his baby batter, the little kindergartner would be spending some time playing video games or looking at cartoons along with Dan in his room as they waited for her big brother and his little sister to get finished so the boys and girls could each spend the rest of the visit with their respective guy friend and gal pal. At the beginning of the month-long punishment, though neither of them could forget he was the boy who’d gotten her pregnant on her sixth birthday, their activities with each other in his room remained entirely friendly and innocent. After about a week and a half of being deprived of his beloved Clara’s company (and coupling), however, he began to develop a rather not so innocent and not wholly unrequited desire for the little sister already carrying his baby.

By the end of the second week, Chloe and Dan had taken to reminiscing about what he and she had done to earn him this deprivation, and were looking at it through a rather rose-tinted retrospective of all the pleasure they’d given each other working up to it while glossing over the painful and humiliating way it had ended. By the end of the third week, their reminiscences had started getting physical, with her sitting in his lap and kissing with him while he ran his hands up under her clothes (which were typically somewhat looser dresses or pants with elastic waistbands to allow him easy access). By the end of the fourth week, as he and Clara were counting down the days until they could be together again, he only barely resisted the temptation to go all the way again as her little sister ground her little slit clad only in a thin and silky layer of underwear beneath her skirt against the tent his boyish bulge was making in the sweatpants he specifically wore for these occasions, and he would sometimes slide his fingers under her underwear and up deep into the entrance of her remarkably wet and pliant little vaginal canal to return the favor; only knowing that he couldn’t lock his door against Jack and Elisa without their demanding an explanation he couldn’t give them, and remembering that he needed to keep a full supply of baby batter for Clara and therefore shouldn’t waste it in her little sister who already had his baby in her kept him from stripping and getting naked with and trying for a happier ending this time with the all too ready-able-and-willing little kindergartner.

When at last the big day came when Clara and Dan’s grounding was at an end, he made the request that he be allowed to celebrate it with a sleepover at her house, and this Francis and Megan approved with the condition that Elisa would also be staying there overnight. To help get them all a little more excited for the renewal of their “relations” with each other, so to speak, he and his friend discreetly made an agreement to spend all their time that afternoon on guy things with each other while their little sisters did their gal things together. Their baby-making and (as Jack liked to put it these days) baby-maintaining activities they would save until after they were all in bed; and just to add a layer of caution, he would leave his clothes and overnight bag in his friend’s bedroom while his little sister would likewise leave hers in her friend’s, and they would all be back bunking with their friends once the boys were done spraying their baby batter in each other’s little sisters.

Their night’s plans pretty effectively went off without a hitch: once Francis and Joe were locked away in their master bedroom (and she was “celebrating” the occasion in the usual way with her husband, though he was just having a good time to have a good time) and the children were all in their pajamas and supposed to be asleep, Dan got up and quietly made his way down the hall to Clara’s bedroom, where he silently motioned to Elisa to go visit Jack in his bedroom up the hall while he and his regular little girlfriend renewed their efforts at making a baby. Each couple had a great time with the baby-making and baby-maintaining activities that night, though the ones trying to make a baby didn’t take very long to finish since they were frantic from being deprived of each other so long, whereas the ones maintaining their baby took their time to have a much more leisurely coupling that brought a longer-lasting kind of satisfaction in exchange for not being quite so intense.

Clara and Dan bounced back quickly from the soothing aftermath of a coupling that had seemed almost violent from all the thrusting and heaving they had been doing. (Their body parts having accommodated and accustomed themselves to each other from experience, he and she had finally mastered doing the same kind of repetitive inward-and-outward motions her folks were also doing in their master bedroom up the hall.) She was in the mood to try for a second round, but he reminded her of their mothers’ house rules about only doing things like this once per day (or night) in order to maximize the amount of baby batter she would be receiving. Besides, he suggested, keeping her appetite for his baby batter whetted for tomorrow would make their next session in his bedroom at his house that much better for them both.

However begrudgingly, Clara agreed to relent, though she insisted Dan stay with her up there on her top bunk (where she continued to prefer to sleep) and cuddle with her a while after they put their underwear and pajamas back on. This he did, waiting until her breathing grew even and measured to extract himself carefully and gradually from her embrace, pull the covers up over her to keep her warm, and slide quietly off her bunk onto the floor. From there, he found his sister’s overnight bag and retrieved the little tube of lubrication her mother had packed in it. (Though the girls’ bodies were getting better at producing their own natural lubrication to the point that they hardly needed the manufactured stuff anymore, his mother still made sure always to pack some in his overnight bag and Elisa’s; better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, as she liked to say.)

As if to prove something to himself, Dan crept silently back up the hall and quietly tried the door to Jack’s bedroom; but as he’d mostly expected, it was locked and the doorknob would therefore not turn in his hand. He little doubted Elisa and his best friend were having themselves quite a good time in there, though he wasn’t going to listen in for confirmation: he didn’t want to know any details, as merely knowing in general what his friend and little sister were doing (and had done many times before) was more than he felt like he really needed to know. Instead, he turned and made his way back down the hall to Chloe’s room.

Dan’s heart picked up its pace a bit as he slowly turned the knob and pushed the door to Chloe’s bedroom open. In the dim light of her nightlight, he saw her lying peacefully on her back in her bed, her eyes closed and her breathing as evenly paced as her big sister’s had been when he’d left her. Taking care to lock the door behind him, he softly sidled up to her bed and brushed the back of his hand lightly against her cheek to awaken her.

Chloe gave out a little murmur, and her eyes fluttered open. When she turned and saw Dan standing there next to her bed and more or less hovering over her, he gave her the naughtiest little smirk and held up the tube of lubricant in his hand to show it to her. Immediately grasping his intentions, she flashed him a naughty grin of her own and immediately peeled away all the blankets covering her, silently motioning to him to join her in her bed.

Easing himself into bed with her, Dan gathered Chloe up in his arms and turned her so she and he sat facing each other with their knees pulled up, and then leaned in and planted a big wet kiss on her lips. She returned the kiss with gusto, and then raised her arms to help him peel her pajama top off over her head, following up by laying herself on her back and raising her legs to help him pull off her bottoms and her little unicorn-themed briefs as well. As soon as he was done stripping her naked this way, he likewise immediately proceeded to shed his own pajama top and bottoms, ending by peeling off his own underwear to let his already very tall and stiff baby-maker spring free before her curious-and-yet-not-at-all-innocent wide-open eyes.

Scooting up to Chloe so his big swelling protrusion was right in front of her own rapidly swelling little cleft, Dan squeezed two blobs of lubricant from the tube: one on his lower head, and one on his fingers which he proceeded to spread all over her lower lips and thrust deep into her little entrance between them. Following his lead, she pressed the other blob on his lower head flat with both her little hands and proceeded to slather the stuff all over the head and shaft down to where it met his scrotum. Though they each gave a little moan of pleasure whenever one of them happened to touch the other on a particularly sensitive spot, they were careful not to stir each other up too quickly so they wouldn’t lose too much control of themselves and start making too much noise.

Remembering how disastrously letting gravity do the work last time had gone, Dan lifted Chloe’s hips up and seated them between his partially open thighs so that the tip of the head of his fleshly rod was pointing directly toward her tiny entrance, but was not immediately beneath it. Remembering how he’d lately noticed Clara liked when he poked or stroked a strange little hooded thing up at the top of her slit, he now located the same part on her little sister and began rubbing the tip of his lower head against it. Just like her big sister, she liked that a lot, moaning her appreciation almost a little too loudly.

Using his hand to help guide himself, Dan began rubbing his tip—which was already beginning to leak a bit of his sperm—up and down into the groove between her lips, making sure to keep bumping that sensitive little hooded part on every upstroke. Chloe opened her mouth and threw her head back, letting out maybe too loud of a groan from all the pleasure he was giving her, while the tiny slit of her entrance began to spread open to welcome his imminent invasion. Placing his mouth over hers to muffle the noises she was making with his kiss, he began pushing his tip into her opening.

Chloe was still very tight down there, though the lubricant was a great help at getting his lower head in past the entrance, much as it had been before. A little moan of discomfort instead of pleasure from his little six-year-old partner’s mouth on his (he knew the difference by now), and he was in; only this time, there would be no blood and no pain as long as he took his time, since she no longer had any hymen for him to rupture. Bit by sweetly agonizingly tiny bit, Dan pressed deeper and deeper into her as she smiled so sweetly and opened her eyes to gaze in rapt adoration into his own.

How long had Dan longed to see cute little Chloe look at him that way, to know she truly loved having him inside her, and how badly he’d hurt her was all water under the bridge for her now? When his tip finally reached the end of the line, bumping up against the sealed portal at the end of her little love tunnel, she threw her arms around his neck and thrust her mouth into his even harder to show her appreciation and approval. Though he returned her embrace with one arm, he used his free hand on the other to poke and rub at that tiny sensitive hooded spot at the top of her opening, which was now stretched wide around his exceedingly thick (for an eleven-year-old) engorged shaft.

Suddenly, all this pleasure at once was just too much for Chloe. Whimpering into Dan’s mouth, she started squirming from side to side and then bucking her hips almost the same way as she had that first time over two months ago on her sixth birthday, as if she were trying to get herself off of him; only this time, it was because of the mighty burst of pleasure she felt within, somewhere in her mind as well as her body. This set Dan off as well, and more baby batter than he would have thought possible when doing this the second time in one evening came exploding out of his bulging eleven-year-old rod into her tightly confined six-year-old little space in five mighty spurts.

As Dan laid his head back on her pillow, Chloe collapsed forward on him as if she were a puppet whose strings had just been cut, her little flesh cavern still comfortably wrapped around most of his flesh rod, though it was already beginning to shrink and go soft within her. At last, she thought as she lay there feeling too good to move, she understood why her big sister wanted to make a baby with this big boy—and that this was what she’d caught them doing that crazy night that seemed so long ago now. He and she were both very hot and sweaty from what they’d just done, but it was a _good_ kind of hot and sweaty.

It took a long time for the sweat to dry and their sweltering naked little bodies to go cold, and Dan thought both he and Chloe had probably dozed off a time or two in the interval, but she finally raised her pretty little head from his chest and smiled weakly at him as she lifted herself off his shrunken boyhood. As a tiny trail of translucent off-whitish-grayish stuff came oozing out of the bottom of her little slit and dripped onto his mostly bald pubic mound (on which all of two fine black hairs could be seen if one looked closely enough), he suddenly realized he’d forgotten to bring any tissues from Elisa’s overnight bag to help clean up this mess. Speaking of his little sister, he was quite certain he heard her next door softly turning the knob and swinging the door to Clara’s bedroom open, which could only mean she and Jack were done with each other for the evening.

Motioning to Chloe not to move, Dan reached out and picked up his discarded underwear from the floor by her bed and carefully wiped the crotch on the little trickle coming from her and then the drops on his pubic mound. If his mom saw the stains in the wash, she’d probably think he’d had a wet dream despite all the ways he’d relieved himself of needing any such safety valve for disposing of his excess baby batter, but... let her think that as long as it meant this little six-year-old girl’s mom wouldn’t find any suspicious stains on her youngest daughter’s bed and find out he’d been baby-maintaining with her. When there was no more leakage to clean up, he put the underwear back on himself, much to both her quiet amusement and silent disgust.

Gathering up the rest of his night clothing and hers, he helped her get everything back on before quickly getting dressed himself. Then he laid her out on her bed in the same way she’d been positioned when he first got here, pulled the covers up over her roughly where they’d been before, and tucked her in. After giving her a tender kiss goodnight, he put his finger to his lips and smiled to remind her this was their little secret, then carefully and quietly unlocked her door and slipped out and just as carefully and quietly closed it behind him to ensure Elisa wouldn’t hear it.

Sneaking back up the hall to Jack’s room, Dan couldn’t help thinking he’d practically become a ninja when it came to sneaking around at night. During that whole beautiful encounter with Chloe, neither he nor she had said a word, but their body language had spoken eloquently enough. Now when he got to Jack’s room, he found his friend was already asleep, so he slipped quietly into his own bunk on the bottom (mercifully, he could tell, not the one his friend had been using with Elisa; she must have climbed up onto the top bunk with him for that) and drifted off to sleep himself.

In the morning, Francis was a bit surprised to see Chloe turn up at breakfast along with the other children, cheerful and with a healthy appetite. Checking the hidden puke bucket in her daughter’s room, she also found it unused. The little kindergartner’s morning sickness might just have been winding down on its own—Elisa’s certainly was these days—or it might have been due to the extra boost to her psychosomatic health Dan had given her last night.

When Clara and Jack went to visit their friends and lovers at the Williamson house that afternoon, Chloe came with them and joined her big sister in Dan’s room while her big brother was busy pumping more of his baby batter into Elisa in her room. (Since they had already made their baby, he was exempt from the no-more-than-once-per-day rule now, and they made sure to enjoy their privilege thoroughly.) The moment both sisters were in Dan’s room and the door was locked behind them, the elder turned to him and said in a soft but unmistakably accusing tone “I know what you did with Chloe last night, Dan. I only pretended I was asleep.”

Dan was a little surprised, but unashamed. “I heard Mom tell Jack it’s good for a girl to have a boy making love to her while she’s pregnant,” he said. “That goes for Chloe as well as for Elisa, I’m pretty sure.”

“Oh? So it’s ‘making love’ now, is it? You saying you love my baby sister?”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m saying,” he replied without hesitation.

“And I love Dan,” added Chloe, pouting a bit defiantly.

Clara rounded on her baby sister. “So you’re over how he hurt you before? Y’all finally got it right last night? Made that connection?”

“You said it yourself, Clara, and so did I,” Dan reminded her. “We never meant to hurt her. You wanted her to feel good just like you felt; and last night, she did.”

“Yeah!” added Chloe.

Clara rounded back on him. “So what about me and how I felt? I could have done with a second helping of your baby batter last night!”

“And what good would it do you? If you’ve got an egg in there right now, my sperm will find it—and there’s a good chance you do. Isn’t your period supposed to start sometime around next week?”

Clara turned up her nose and grumbled “Hmph!”

“I’m just saying, if you’ve got an egg in there, what I gave you should be enough. More’s not gonna make you any more pregnant than you already might be.”

“Yeah, but more’s not gonna knock her up anymore than ya did already either!” Clara cried. “She’s gotten to see you all month, but I ain’t! If Elisa didn’t tell me y’all kept your clothes on when you was getting handsy with her the last couple weeks, I might think I’d been replaced already! I—”

Suddenly closing the gap between them, Dan caught Clara up in his arms in a big strong bear hug and pressed his mouth onto hers for a big sloppy kiss. She struggled for a few moments, making little muffled squeals in her throat as if trying to scream, but then gave up and went limp while she waited for him to relax his grip. This was exactly what he was waiting for her to do, so this was when he finally broke off from kissing her, though he didn’t relax his bear hug much.

“Clara, how can you talk that way? I could never replace you!” pleaded Dan. “You were my first love, and you’ll always be. It was you I wanted to have my baby, long before I ever got the chance to try making one with you, and I still do!”

Clara was calmer than before, but remained skeptical. “Oh yeah? So you’re saying you don’t love Chloe more than me?”

“No! I mean yes!” Realizing how she could easily take what he’d said the wrong way, he quickly added “I mean, yes, I’m saying no, I don’t love her more than I love you!”

Clara tried to keep an angry expression on her face, but she couldn’t help smirking a little bit as his tongue tripped over itself. “Did you know you’re funny when you’re being stupid?”

“Did anybody ever tell you you’re cute when you’re mad?” Dan shot back smoothly.

Chloe, who had been watching this exchange between her big sister and lover with some concern and confusion, said “Clara? What you doing?”

Clara briefly turned her head in her baby sister’s general direction and said “Not now, Chloe,” before turning back to Dan and saying “Then you’re saying you love me now like you loved my baby sister last night?”

“You know I do!” he replied, again without hesitation—which Clara took as a good sign of his sincerity.

“Then prove it!” she said. “Get our clothes off and _make love_ to me like you did to her, but right here, right now—right in front of her.”

“For real? You want her to watch us doing it?” Dan glanced over at Chloe, and saw some expression on her face he couldn’t quite read. She’d already seen them naked and coupling with each other once before, he reminded himself, although that had been when they were finished; and she could hardly have failed to realize in retrospect what she’d caught them doing, given that she’d just done it with him herself last night. “Chloe, do you want to watch us?” he asked.

“Of course you do!” insisted Clara, before Chloe could even open her mouth.

“Now, don’t push her. Chloe, tell me yourself: do you want to watch me making love to your big sister?”

Chloe smiled. “Yeah!” she said.

“You’re sure? You’re not just saying that to please her? Because that’s what Clara wants you to say?”

Chloe pouted, and replied. “She watched you do it to me. I wanna watch you do it to her.”

Clara grinned in triumph. “See?”

Dan was a little nervous, not sure if he’d do as well with an audience as without, but he reminded himself both girls already knew how he looked without his clothes, and had let him see them—and strip them—naked and do a lot more than that with them too. Also, as Chloe pointed out, Clara had watched him do the deed with her—and although the ending that time had been horrific, he had managed to get enough of his baby batter into her even then to start that baby she now had growing in her (though barely showing yet; the bulge in her belly was only noticeable when she was naked).

“Fine,” he agreed. “If that’s what it takes, I’ll do it; but when we’re done, then I’m gonna make love to her in front of you too.”

“Oh yeah? I’d like to see you try, when I’m done with you!” Clara boasted. “I bet you won’t have anything left for her by then. Come on, Dan! Let’s see what you got!” Squirming free from his relaxed embrace, she grabbed at his shirt and started tugging it up out of his trousers. Taking the hint, Dan laid hands on her blouse and went to work peeling it off of her. In less than a minute, they were both naked and she was practically tackling him backward onto his bed.

As little Chloe watched them aggressively hugging and kissing and groping and thrusting and heaving on his bed, she remembered how much more carefully and tenderly Dan had “made love” (as he put it) to her in her bed last night, and couldn’t help thinking doing it so quickly as they were now couldn’t possibly feel so wonderful as doing it so slowly and methodically had. Even so, she instinctively let a hand drift under her clothes and stroked herself and ran a few fingers up into her little slit as she watched and waited for her turn. She hardly realized what she was doing until they were finished and lying in a warm and sweaty heap with each other and she looked down; but then she remembered how when Clara had watched him making his baby with her that first time, she’d briefly seen her big sister doing the exact same thing to herself (except without any of her clothes in the way), and figured turnabout was fair play.

Clara certainly had done her best to make good on her boast, Dan had to admit, as he lay there with her wrapped in his arms and enjoyed the afterglow (as he was now learning to call it) of their lovemaking. She’d definitely squeezed more baby batter out of him than he’d thought he could have after last night’s experience, and for a remarkably long time, nothing—not even the sight of cute little Chloe with one hand down under her clothes in front playing with herself as she awaited her turn—could stir up his desires and make his shriveled boyhood stand and deliver again. Nevertheless, the time passed; and as their sweat dried and their bodies cooled, he looked again to her little sister (who was starting to get bored with waiting) and felt his desires rekindle.

As Clara—still naked, as she didn’t feel like getting dressed yet—sat in the swiveling chair at his desk and watched in mild disbelief, Dan calmly and yet ardently began to kiss Chloe and massage her with his hands as he took his time stripping her clothes off her piece by piece (including her shoes and socks). When she was finally completely naked, he actually picked her up—not so easily, as she’d gained a few pounds lately—and carried her with her legs wrapped lovingly around his waist to his bed, where he took a good deal more time fondling and groping and massaging her little cleft with both his fingers and his burgeoning boyhood in order to make her even wetter than she already was and get her ready to impale herself on him. When that time came, she met his initial thrust into her with a good hard downward push of her own, and then they kept on pushing until he was as far up into her as he could go.

Thanks to all the ways he’d been stimulating her, it was Chloe who crossed the threshold first and began shaking and jerking in his lap as her pleasure overwhelmed her. Shortly after that, Dan passed that same familiar point of no return and managed to pump three good hard spurts of his baby batter into the barrier at the end of her tight little tunnel. Then it was over, and he held her sweltering naked body to his own in the same firm and warm embrace as he had with Clara’s in the aftermath of their lovemaking.

Clara was duly impressed: evidently, her lover really did have enough prowess in bed to be able to satisfy both her and her baby sister. Dan was feeling truly spent, knowing those final three spurts of his baby batter had been all he had left to give at the time; even if he could work up enough desire and enthusiasm for a third round of lovemaking with either little girl, he was certain neither would get anything more of any value out of him today. Chloe was in a state of bliss very much the same as she’d experienced last night, though she vaguely realized this round hadn’t been quite as intensely pleasurable as her last; not that she much cared, as she was mostly just thinking about how she really hoped she’d get to do this with him again tomorrow.

Jack having—twice—taken his time “maintaining the baby” with Elisa in her room so he and she would thoroughly enjoy it, both his baby sisters and his friend had long since cleaned themselves up and gotten dressed and unlocked the door to the bedroom by the time he arrived to join him for their usual activities. Even so, he could hardly help noticing both Clara and Chloe had the same affectionate and cheerful disposition his own little girlfriend typically exhibited for an hour or two after their lovemaking; or, for that matter, the way they lingered at the door for a while gazing fondly at Dan before going off to do girl stuff with their friend in her room. As soon as they were gone, he raised his eyebrow at his friend.

“It’s not just Clara anymore, is it?” he said. “You’re doing it with Chloe too.”

“What can I say? I really do love her, Jack,” said Dan.

“That’s what you said about Clara too.”

“And I still mean it; I love them both in their own way. It’s just... It’s not quite the same with Chloe: she was never my fantasy like Clara was.”

“But you just pumped your baby batter into her the same as with Clara. Gotta say, man, I never would have thought you had it in you. I was the one imagining making babies with lots of different girls back when you already had your eye on just one; but just look at us now.”

“You really do feel _that way_ about my little sister, don’t you?”

“What can I say? Other girls don’t compare. If we ever get back to school, I don’t think the other boys are ever gonna see me get a boner ever again.”

“ _If_ we ever get back. Here’s hoping we don’t.”

“You said it, man! Good riddance to those jerks.”

“But back to what you were saying before: Elisa’s truly one of a kind to you?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“That’s what I thought about Clara too, but... you know the story.”

“How could I forget? Wouldn’t have believed it was her idea; fact, I _didn’t_ believe you when you said it was, not at first. Couldn’t hardly believe it even when she said as much herself.”

“I was kinda surprised when she said she just wanted me to make Chloe feel good like I’d done for her. You know how Clara can be kinda bratty and she usually wants everything her own way, but in that case, she just wanted to share me with her little sister.”

“And now they do share you; ain’t that about right?”

“Yeah, that’s about how it’s gone.”

“I hope you’re still giving Clara enough to knock her up.”

“Oh, don’t you worry: she gets first dibs on me. I was telling her just today, if she’s got an egg in there, my sperm will find it.”

“Just like it found Chloe’s and mine found Elisa’s, huh? I kinda wonder why that didn’t work for Clara; it’s not like she’s that far apart from Elisa when it comes to being on the rag.”

“I looked it up a couple weeks ago: it seems even when you do everything right, all kinds of things can go wrong: the egg’s too old, or it doesn’t plant itself right, or something’s wrong with the sperm that fertilized it. Of course, I don’t think it was that last one, since Chloe got hers from me from just that one time.”

“Kinda funny, ain’t it? Her having one to give to Pa ahead of her big sister, I mean. Can’t say for sure if there’s a way this kinda thing’s supposed to go, but seems to me if there is, it’s that the big sister’s supposed to get knocked up first.”

“Yeah, I suppose that would kinda make sense. Too bad nothing much does these days.”

“I hear ya.”

The next day, as usual, Dan and Elisa officially went to visit their friends and unofficially to make love to their friends’ siblings over at the Williams household. As hot and bothered as each little girl had gotten from watching the other taking her turn with their shared lover, neither Chloe nor Clara really wanted to do anything like that ever again, since each girl’s turn-on from this experience had been much more of the “bothered” than the “hot” variety. As such, each girl stayed in her own room for the duration both while she was taking her turn with him and while her sister was; and now that he knew the score, Jack likewise stayed in his room and took plenty of time to indulge in thoroughly pleasuring his little girlfriend both times he pumped another big helping of his baby batter into her increasingly voracious little seven-year-old body. (If anything, carrying his baby was actually making his thrusting of his baby-maker into her little baby hole feel even better than it had before; lately, she always crossed her pleasure threshold before he reached his, leaving him to finish spraying his sperm into her cervix a minute or two later when she was already lying there basking in blissful satisfaction.)

The following day, the two and a half couples were back at the Williamson house again for their trysts. This time, first Chloe and then Clara came up with an excuse to be out of Dan’s room while her sister was in bed with him. Francis and Megan couldn’t help noticing this shift in the children’s patterns and rightly suspecting all three girls were now getting at least one share apiece of the baby batter from the boys per day, but they kept what few qualms and misgivings they had about a little kindergartner being daily inseminated along with her older sister to themselves: she was—after all—already pregnant, the mothers had already given their approval and support to having her friend in the first grade and her sister in the second grade—who weren’t a whole lot older and bigger than she was—doing the very same things, and she wasn’t complaining or doing anything else that might indicate she was participating in any of these activities against her will.

As Elisa’s baby bump was starting to be more visible when she was naked, Jack began experimenting with making love to her in different positions, and encouraged Dan to do the same with Clara and Chloe as the latter’s bump was also beginning to show. Initially, they tried a few simple variations on their favorite position of sitting face to face with the girl on top: first lying down with her on top (which they only found to their liking when she was lying down with her face in his so they could kiss), then lying side by side (which worked pretty well but felt “kinda weird” in both boys’ opinions), and then a few variations of the “missionary position” with the boy on top; mostly the only one they found to their liking (because it didn’t risk their squashing their little girlfriends in a moment of passion) was the one that had the girl on the edge of the bed with her legs dangling over it while the boy knelt between them and thrust himself into her (and only when she was sitting up so that—again—they could kiss). They then tried just a few of the odder positions that occurred to them, such as doing it standing up, or sitting down with the girl on top in what those more familiar with sexual terms than they were might have called a “reverse cowgirl” position; but making love standing up (especially since their little girlfriends had to be standing on something to bring their genitals up to roughly the same level as their own) proved to be as difficult as Megan had once mentioned to Francis (though they didn’t know about that), and neither the boys nor the girls enjoyed having to crane their necks and shoulders around to do any kissing in that “reverse cowgirl” position.

So they continued to stick to making love while sitting or lying on their beds face to face, albeit with a few more variations. As they had all hoped, one of Clara’s daily inseminations from Dan finally caught one of her eggs, and she missed her period the next week. Not wanting to get everyone’s hopes up too soon, Francis and Megan waited a whole week to see if she was just a little late before having her take one of those cheap home pregnancy tests from a dollar store and getting a positive reading; then, just to be on the safe side, they waited another full week before giving her the test again and getting the same result.

As Alabama’s governor and legislature had hoped, the illegal strike started crumbling as a few striking teachers crossed the picket line to get back to work and the leadership finally began to attempt an actual negotiation for an end to the strike. Their meddlesome grievance group allies started making thinly veiled threats of violence against the leadership for “selling out the cause” if they didn’t get any concessions, so the negotiation hit a very fatal snag: the unions insisted that on returning to work, the illegal strikers had to be given full back pay for all the time they had been away, as if they had done their jobs and never left; other than those teachers who’d crossed the picket line and “turned scab” on them, of course. The governor, legislature, and public were now beyond furious with the strikers and their allies, so with the help of a bill the legislature had been crafting for months, the governor finally announced that every last one of the strikers was fired; and for their nigh-criminal failure to do their jobs, the massive stain their engaging in this illegal strike was going to earn them on their final performance evaluations (and personnel files) would effectively blacklist them from working not only in Alabama’s public school system, but in any school anywhere that had enough self-respect to screen its potential hires.

The unions and their media allies went ballistic in denouncing this decision, and the same grievance groups who’d threatened the union leadership now rioted in the city streets, forcing the governor to call in the National Guard to quell these “mostly peaceful demonstrations” (as the media referred to all their burning, looting, and mayhem) and place the cities under curfews with further and more stringent measures to be taken if necessary. In the face of this show of force, most rioters surrendered and were arrested; but some brought out their guns and started shooting, and the National Guard had to use lethal force (i.e. shoot them dead). The media continued to scream and denounce these enforcement actions as “fascism” and “detrimental to democracy and the rule of law” and to compare their enforcement actions to Kristallnacht (and the rioters to the Rosenstrasse protesters), but in the eyes of the vast majority of Alabama’s public, everything about the illegal strike was over but this hateful and hypocritical screaming from the treasonous media; and soon that would effectively be silenced as well as unsympathetic readers and viewers canceled what few remaining subscriptions they had to the contemptible “mainstream” media’s hate literature and tuned out its hate channels and hate sites once and for all, sending their viewer ratings (and consequently their ad revenues) into free fall.

In the aftermath of Alabama’s smashing victory over the teachers’ unions, however, its public schools remained understaffed for many months afterward; for though soundly thrashed, the unions didn’t take their defeat gracefully, harassing and threatening various reprisals (most of them illegal) against any certified teacher who dared seek employment in Alabama. The teachers who remained therefore had to continue teaching remotely, and quite often with their class sizes doubled due to their fired former colleagues’ classes being merged with their own. The Williams and Williamson children were among the many students who would continue “learning” (to the degree one could learn anything in these video conferences) remotely from their homes.

Needless to say, this proved to be a very convenient arrangement for Francis and Megan and their amorous little boys and girls for keeping their daily lovemaking and their growing baby bumps away from the prying eyes of their teachers and principal and other public authorities, but they could only conceal these things from their respective husbands and fathers for a little longer. Already, Chloe and Elisa were exclusively confined to wearing dresses a couple sizes too big for them to help conceal their bulging bellies from the babies that had now been growing in them for more than three months. Clara was also suffering from occasional bouts of morning sickness now (though not quite often enough to raise her father’s suspicions or require some bogus norovirus infection as a cover story), and Dan could quite easily spot her baby bump these days whenever she was naked with him.

When Chloe and Elisa were four months along and Clara two, Francis and Megan finally decided keeping the secret was too difficult for them anymore, even with husbands as inattentive as theirs. They called Jim and Joe and all their children together for a big joint family conference at the Williams house, and had each girl in turn from the eldest to the youngest present her baby bump to her gobsmacked father and proudly announce she was carrying her boyfriend’s baby for him. Then they had Dan and Jack step forward to confirm just who the girls’ boyfriends were and announce they had also done this for their fathers’ sakes.

After a longer stunned silence than even Francis and Megan would have thought possible, the weeping and wailing and raging and gnashing of teeth and accusations and recriminations and crying and pleading for understanding were truly epic. Chloe and Clara and their mother as well all had to gather around and cling to Dan and cover him with their bodies to stop Joe from carrying out his threat to beat and strangle him to death on the spot, while Elisa and her mother and Jack all had to talk Jim out of going looking for one of his friend’s guns with plans to do something desperate with it (they weren’t sure exactly what, but easily surmised none of the possibilities were anything good). Only with considerable pressure from their wives and children did the men finally come to accept that they still loved their families and their families still loved them, and that absolutely nothing good could ever come from alerting the relevant authorities to what every last other member of their families had been doing and thereby breaking them up.

Part of what persuaded Jim and Joe to keep quiet and support their wives’ and children’s project was being reminded of reports that with premature menopause now overtaking fourteen-year-old and even thirteen-year-old girls, many parents of twelve-year-old girls were arranging “reproductive dates” for them with boys their own age or up to two years older, while parents of some eleven-year-old girls were publicly lining up “designated deflowerers” to take their young daughters’ virginity as soon as they reached their twelfth birthdays and continue having sex with them until they got pregnant. “For every one of those, how many more ain’t gonna wait that long—or ain’t waited at all, like us **—** but just ain’t coming right out and saying it?” Francis asked. It was a telling point, and both fathers could work out something left unsaid but clearly implied for themselves: if premature menopause continued to strike girls at younger and younger ages—as it had been doing these last months, though the trend finally seemed to be leveling off a bit—their own little girls might not be able to have any babies by the time they reached age twelve; if they had waited for state laws to change to accommodate the trend, it might already have been too late for them.

So they kept their mouths shut and helped their wives continue to work out plans for how to cover up their families’ crimes of necessity. Keeping their little girls’ pregnancies hidden from their teachers at school, of course, would be ridiculously easy for so long as the classes remained virtual: they simply would never let the cameras on their laptops see the girls below their chests, something those cameras had rarely seen much these last few months anyway. The more difficult logistical problem for them to solve was: how were they to arrange for their painfully diminutive little girls to give birth safely when the time for that arrived?

For this, they had to plan very carefully indeed.


	11. Epilogue: Reciprocity

Doctor Geoffrey Klahn was almost orgasmic with happiness as he read the long and most exquisitely detailed news account of the Williams and Williamson families’ illegal and yet most awe-inspiring (even to the reporter who’d written the article) reproductive achievements down in Alabama. The accounts of the girls’ menarches commencing at what were considered insanely young ages at the time thrilled him, as did the writer’s casual rehashing of the well-known facts of the past year about all girls now reaching menarche at age four or five—and how exceedingly rare it was now _for some unknown reason_ for a girl to reach age six and still not be a bleeder as little Chloe Williams—the last “Snow White” in her kindergarten class—had managed to do. Of course, the writer also noted, it seemed that all these prematurely pubescent girls these days were also doomed for _some unknown reason_ to reach menopause at ten or eleven years of age at the very latest; the same age the little kindergartner’s boyfriend Dan Williamson had been at the time he impregnated her.

So his precocity virus had left the girls a five to seven year window of fertility to keep the human race going, Klahn reflected: slightly more than he’d intended, but he could live with that margin of error. While it also left them mostly flat-chested and devoid of pubic hair up until they would originally have started getting these features, he could also live with knowing that the occasional girl who managed to be fertile into her eleventh year of age would still be able to grow enough of a pair of breasts to produce some milk for a late-arriving baby who managed to be conceived shortly before her fertility window closed—as well as possibly growing just a few pubic hairs. Let hair fetishists and boys who preferred their girls buxom have their fun—and then mostly go extinct from waiting too long for these features to appear in their partners to begin procreating with them: from now on, humanity’s future would mostly be in the hands—and loins—of those who preferred to have their offspring with fresh young hairless little beauties with little to no womanly curvature on any part of their bodies—as he rather did.

He also read with great satisfaction and a sense of irony of the man these family’s fathers had enlisted to help each of their little daughters give birth: a former abortionist who’d had his license revoked and spent some time in prison for helping a number of molesters cover up their crimes by aborting the babies they’d either accidentally or carelessly conceived with their young victims. He’d been rather astonished to be tasked with bringing these little girls’ babies out alive and intact instead of murdering them and bringing them out in pieces, but for the money each of the fathers had offered him, he’d managed to perform successful cesarean sections on both Chloe Williams and Elisa Williamson on the very same night to bring forth the former’s baby girl and the latter’s baby boy almost simultaneously. The former was almost exactly nine months past her sixth birthday when her baby girl was born; the latter eight years old when she had her baby boy, though she’d been seven when she conceived him.

Then they had brought the “good” doctor back about two months later to assist the now nine-year-old Clara Williams in birthing what turned out to be her little baby boy. She’d proved to be quite a little trooper at her age, insisting on giving birth without any cutting despite the long and painful ordeal this natural delivery proved to be for her, although the doctor did give nature a hand using a prescription pharmaceutical he’d obtained via the black market to help dilate her cervix. Reading about her triumphant attitude upon finally being able to present her now twelve-year-old boyfriend Dan Williamson’s baby to her father to raise as his own warmed Klahn’s heart and gave him a euphoric feeling as if he vicariously shared her sense of triumph.

The next twist in the story he found even more satisfying, as the former abortionist they’d hired to birth these babies had ultimately been the one who’d finked and turned state’s evidence against the two families as part of a deal to save his own skin. Though he ended up walking free after paying a $1,500 fine and being placed on a year’s probation, the local media’s sensational coverage of his part in the families’ criminal trial led to an angry local mob dragging him from his house in the middle of the night and lynching him. For all the police and politicians who paid lip service to condemning this lawless act of vigilantism, nobody seemed incredibly heartbroken over its victim.

Finally came the story of the rest of the trial, in which Mr. and Mrs. Williams and Mr. and Mrs. Williamson were each convicted on multiple charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, moral turpitude, and conspiracy to commit child sexual abuse, among other things. As for the children, each of them was convicted on lots of charges of—absurd as it sounded—“mutual” statutory rape with Dan Williamson specifically being convicted on nearly twice as many counts. Then a public hue and cry over what many deemed the overly harsh punishments to which these families had been sentenced (especially every last one of them being placed on Alabama’s sex offender registry) led to the governor granting a full pardon to every one of them.

In good part—much to Klahn’s further euphoria—the reason for this hue and cry and the governor’s subsequent sweeping pardon was that a staggering number of families with pubescent young boys and little girls in Alabama were guilty of the very same crimes due to the state’s laws not keeping up with the times, and the legislature was at this point crafting a bill reforming its laws concerning sexual abuse and statutory rape to bring them more in line with the new reality of the vast majority of little girls needing to procreate before they turned twelve if they were ever going to procreate at all. As if to add another satisfying twist of the knife into those teachers’ unions and their allies who’d plagued the state with their illegal strike and absurd demands for children to be taught all manner of depraved sexual practices, the legislature whimsically termed this a “reproductive rights” bill since it helped establish a legal framework for little girls to have a _right_ to _reproduce_ while they still had the natural capacity for doing so.

While the article didn’t happen to go any further into depth on this point, Klahn happened to know that due to numerous other states’ legislatures following Alabama’s lead in introducing similar reform bills legalizing reproductive sex for girls under the age of twelve, pro-abortion groups and individuals (increasingly strapped for support and supporters) had quietly retired the euphemistic term “reproductive rights” from their genocide-rationalizing lexicons; and he was ecstatic. In numerous states across the USA and in numerous other countries around the world, the new laws Alabama had pioneered in response to the bold and heroic actions of the likes of the Williams and Williamson families were giving rise to numerous similar bills and legal reforms. As for Dan and Jack and Chloe and Clara and Elisa, the article concluded that their very active sex lives continued unabated, and they were hoping each girl would produce at least one or two more offspring while she still could.

Mrs. Jane Tucker Anthony Klahn, the good doctor’s wife, noticed her husband was in a good mood this evening. So was she, as it happened: her reproductive insurance policy of having her eggs cryogenically frozen a number of years ago had finally paid off, and though her husband didn’t know yet, the scans and tests indicated she was about a month and a half pregnant with his little baby girl. Though she was now prematurely past menopause just as all the other women in the world were, she was one of the fortunate few who would still be having a child.

As for dear old Doctor Geoffrey Klahn, she could hear some of what he was so happily muttering almost—but not quite—under his breath about “...those antiquated laws repealed...” and “...without consequence, and now they shall have it...” and “...every baby’s life valued in full at last!” Glancing over her husband’s shoulder, Jane saw the article he was reading and began to understand why he was so euphoric: while she’d only skimmed it herself, she knew it was about children having children with other children, a subject she was secretly aware turned him on like probably nothing else. Smiling, she waited until he got near the end, and then came and slipped her arms around him and kissed him to invite him to bed; and as she expected, he accepted, and gave her still relatively lithe young body a good hard thorough working-over that night.

It was the best sex she’d had in years, in fact; almost as good as it had been back when he was her professor in college, and she was the “innocent” young student seducing him into having a torrid affair with her both because she wanted better grades and because she really was rather attracted to both his brilliance and his handsome appearance at the time. Of course, the latter had faded considerably in the decade following his scandalous marriage to her (which had resulted in his being forced to resign his professorate in disgrace and seek employment elsewhere, which was how he’d come to work in a secret government lab); but she was still enamored of his brains and wanted to have his babies, and though he’d put her off seemingly until it was too late, she was going to be having one with him now anyway. Brilliant as he was, he could be a bit clueless at times and was not very observant: even though she’d gained a few pounds in the last month and a half since conception, and though she’d put all of her naked body on display when she’d mounted him in bed this evening (granted, the low “romantic” lighting wasn’t the best for seeing, but still), he evidently either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t comprehended the slight bulge in her lower abdomen.

For that matter, Jane reflected as she lay snuggled up to him afterward, being so bright and having so much talent on the theory and practice of genetic manipulation had left him with a great many blind spots toward certain deficiencies he had in other subjects: computer network security, for instance, which was one subject for which she had a rather superior talent. Geoffrey supposed she didn’t know about his more socially anathema sexual propensities, for instance, or about the guilty pleasures he derived from indulging these shameful fantasies of his at some of the extremely skeevy sites he regularly sought out online. Just because he was always careful to clear the cache on his web browser when he was done looking at these sites and never saved any of the stories or images or videos from them to his computer, he thought she couldn’t figure out where he’d been and what he’d been seeing; in fact, she knew with considerable precision what kinds of material he liked and what kinds he didn’t from viewing the extensive secret tracking logs she’d programmed the wireless router at their house to keep of his online activities.

Tracking some of the places Geoffrey had been online had helped clarify to her the nature of some of his odd sexual propensities: the stories he liked to read and the images and videos he liked to view (mostly rendered, though he did like to view some line drawings as well) were all focused on prepubescent little girls aged from about four to twelve years old quite consensually having vaginal sex exclusively with heterosexual males. While some of the stories and images and videos he’d viewed featured a grown man or adolescent boy as the girl’s sexual partner, it seemed he tended to prefer pieces in which the girl’s partner was a prepubescent boy roughly her own age or a little older. The apparent reason he preferred pieces involving these little girls being impregnated at such a tender age was that this practically guaranteed the sex would be vaginal; but if it proved to have even the slightest hint of anything involving anilingus or cunnilingus or fellatio or rectal penetration anywhere in it, he would immediately close it out.

Jane had always known about her husband’s loathing for all oral and anal sexual activities from the very start of their relationship when she first set out to seduce him, for her efforts had suffered a number of setbacks from making him offers he could all too easily refuse to do some of these things for him. Though very meticulous in his use of contraception to ensure they didn’t get caught, Geoffrey had made clear to her he was strictly into vaginal sex; and though willing to experiment with numerous positions in numerous settings, he always insisted she be facing him when they did it. “Kinky vanilla” she called this strangely un-perverse perversity of his; never willing to stick his reproductive organ anywhere other than into her own, and yet never allowing this to lead to any reproduction either: even after they’d been married for years and his paycheck from the secret lab where he worked was big enough that they could afford to have children, he had continued to use condoms and insist that she wear her cervical cap as well just to be on the safe side.

His using condoms, not at all coincidentally, had been the undoing of his perpetual delay in giving her any offspring: it had left her a repository for his semen she could—and did—easily retrieve from his waste basket later after he’d gone to sleep, and empty into a home collection kit she’d then send to a sperm bank to be frozen and stored for later use. These stored samples were a further aspect of her reproductive insurance plan that had paid off beautifully after premature menopause had suddenly spoiled her earlier plan—when Jane got tired of waiting for Geoffrey to agree it was time for them to have some children—to inseminate herself directly from one of his discarded condoms. Though being implanted with one of her frozen eggs fertilized by his frozen sperm had been much more expensive than getting pregnant the (mostly) natural way would have been, she easily persuaded herself this backup plan had been worth every penny.

While digging through logs of Geoffrey’s internet use had given Jane considerable insight into his more personal desires, hacking into the connection between his home computer and the network at the secret lab where he worked was what had provided her with a view of his broader political and social interests and goals. While he’d always understood the intricate workings of biological mechanics and genetics better than she had, her computer skills and understanding of the intricate workings of computer code had always greatly exceeded his; and she had lately been taking to heart the lesson he had taught her so long ago when he was still her professor that the genetic code in every living being’s DNA was not that far different from the binary code in every computer, since DNA simply had four letters in its alphabet in comparison to binary code’s two numbers. From her discreet remote exploration of his lab’s intranet using his computer at home while he was at work, she’d managed to locate a lot of the files in the lab’s database containing genetic maps of the various viral and bacterial pathogens her husband and his colleagues were researching, and to realize—much to her horror—the highly morally questionable and potentially deadly nature and purpose of some of their projects.

Last year, when some instinctive intuition or premonition had kept her from sleeping one night after Geoffrey came home early from his job without explanation and gave her a good time in bed, Jane had been attempting to gain access to certain restricted files at his lab when suddenly some kind of alert she’d never seen before popped up on one of the lab computers’ desktops she was viewing remotely, stating that the genetic sequencer was currently operating. Curious, she opened a certain program pertaining to that sequencer she’d noticed on her husband’s computer before, but had previously thought irrelevant because a scan of its properties indicated he hadn’t accessed it in years. The program promptly showed her what file the sequencer was running and how far the construction and replication of the genetic sequence it was producing had proceeded.

The file it was running was new, having been created about five minutes before it was loaded into the sequencer, but searching the lab’s database for certain other files containing some of the same strings of code she’d spotted in this file quickly narrowed down the sources for the genetic sequence’s constituent parts to three files: one containing the sequence for a “null” virus that didn’t do anything and was clearly intended to be the base on which to construct a more customized pathogen, one containing the sequence for an extremely fast-acting and deadly virus, and one containing a complete genetic map of a certain Doctor Geoffrey Klahn. Needless to say, Jane was horrified, and immediately thought of waking her husband and warning him somebody was creating a bio-weapon to assassinate him. However, she quickly reconsidered whether she really wanted to reveal how she’d been spying on him and his workplace and viewing heavily restricted classified materials, and decided instead to investigate who the intended assassin might be.

The investigation didn’t take long at all, since a scan of who else was using the intranet at this moment revealed only one other user active there besides herself at her husband’s computer: a user with an IP address matching that of one Doctor Phillip O’Donnell. She’d met the man a few times—Geoffrey had invited him and his wife to dinner on several occasions—and never would she ever have thought he would want to kill her husband, but the scan left her no doubt he was the one doing this: from what she knew of his wife—with whom she’d had several pleasant conversations at those dinner parties, though they’d never really gotten to be good friends—she certainly couldn’t be the one operating O’Donnell’s computer, and he didn’t have anyone else living with him. She couldn’t allow his assassination attempt to succeed, but she couldn’t take this matter to the authorities either, since she and her husband would both be in big trouble with his superiors if they found out how easily she’d breached the lab’s security using his computer.

There was only one workable solution to this problem she could see, and that was for her to assassinate the would-be assassin. After copying the new pathogen’s file over to her husband’s computer before its creator could delete it from the system (which he promptly did as soon as the sequencer was finished producing his viral murder weapon), she proceeded to copy all three of the other files he had used in crafting his assassin virus and another one containing O’Donnell’s complete genetic map. Though Jane had thought hacking the virus to make it kill him instead of her husband would be more difficult, a comparison of each of the genetic sequences he’d used to craft it with the complete sequence of the virus itself proved it disturbingly easy to reconfigure the virus to target any individual so long as one had his or her complete genetic map on file to drop into a specific section of the viral sequence.

This “reprogramming” of the virus took only a few minutes, therefore; but ironically for her, locating the program for loading the file and running the sequencer ended up taking several frantic and frustrating hours when she mistook the sequencer’s monitoring program she had up and running on her husband’s computer already for its control program. When she finally pulled back and took a moment to pull herself together and try a new approach, she ended up having to laugh (quietly) at herself for not having spotted the separate control program much earlier when it had been sitting there in the same file folder next to the monitoring program all along; and to curse (also quietly) the programs’ writer for not having tied the monitoring and control programs together into one executable file. By the time she’d made this discovery and loaded the file and started the sequencer running, the first few rays of sunrise were already peeking over the horizon outside and morning was already dawning; she didn’t even bother getting back into bed with her husband, but simply made some coffee for herself, and then breakfast for them both and (while she was at it) made and packed him a lunch using some leftovers in the refrigerator.

Though she’d ordered the sequencer’s reset (which she noticed to her satisfaction would thoroughly purge anything that was in there already to make room for its new product) herself, Jane had not entirely believed the assassination virus was actually going to work until it actually did. Only when Geoffrey returned home early again that afternoon to inform her of his colleague Doctor O’Donnell’s sudden unexpected death (while casually omitting its cause) did she realize she truly had killed a man. To make this personal revelation a little more disturbing, not only did the subsequent investigation fail to trace his suspicious death back to her, but even her husband—whose computer she had used, after all—was swiftly cleared of any suspicion of foul play in the death of the man who (whether he knew it or not) had been his mortal enemy.

Strange as it seemed, getting away with such a serious crime only made Jane feel guiltier somehow, even though the victim had unquestionably only gotten what he had coming to him for attempting to murder her husband. More vaguely disturbing—albeit with much further-reaching implications—was realizing just how lax the security measures at the secret lab where Geoffrey worked truly were: while he was innocent and therefore certainly did deserve to be cleared of suspicion, the investigation’s failure to trace the crafting and creation of the murder weapon back to his computer suggested there might be other massive holes in the lab’s security she—or some other expert hacker with computing skills to rival her own—could exploit. This suspicion she’d soon confirmed by studying the genetic sequencer’s control and monitoring programs further and realizing it lacked a certain critical fail-safe: though the door to the synthesis chamber had to be closed before it was allowed to produce anything, its cleaning sequence for purging the chamber of previous products only kept the door closed by default; with some discreet alterations to its operating codes, she realized she could have the machine leave the door open during the cleaning sequence and thereby expose whichever room contained it—and possibly the whole lab—to any pathogen it might have previously produced.

More recently, Jane had discovered another mistake Geoffrey had made in keeping a file he should have destroyed. It being possible to copy files from computers connected to the lab’s intranet to his home computer, it had recently occurred to her to search his computer to see if he had any genetic sequence files stored on it. She only found one such file, but what a file it was!

“FRPV.gsq” the file was named, and a look at its internal header revealed the meaning of the abbreviation: this particular genetic sequence was for a virus (which Jane already recognized as being constructed on the “null” virus) called the Female Reproductive Precocity Virus. While the significance of the name took a moment to register, it only took a moment because she had to work out how the words modified each other; every one of them was otherwise recognizable to her vocabulary. When she worked it out, the meaning fairly leaped out at her: a virus to make female reproduction precocious sounded an awful lot like something that might make a female’s reproductive organs reach maturity a lot sooner than they should; something that could—say—make prepubescent girls begin to ovulate and menstruate at as young as four or five years of age the way the few girls around the world currently at young enough ages to be attending preschool and kindergarten were currently doing.

Analyzing and comparing the various strands of DNA in this virus to the sequences in various other genetic sequence files available on the lab’s intranet confirmed it to be based on certain genetic sequences from girls who’d experienced precocious puberty—and women who’d suffered from premature menopause. Jane recited a very nasty expletive as she came to realize the full implications of what the virus this file was intended to create actually did. All those girls and women around the world whose reproductive systems had started and stopped functioning long before they should have—including herself—had fallen victim to this virus, she was almost certain; and her husband Geoffrey was the one who’d crafted and released it.

All to indulge his secret perversions, Geoffrey had crafted a virus that had shaken up all civilizations and societies around the world, an epidemic threatening humanity with extinction unless people and cultures worldwide ultimately learned to accept and accommodate the practice of repeatedly impregnating extremely young and little girls for all of the roughly five to seven years their reproductive systems would be able to produce offspring naturally before they aged out when the girls were ten or eleven. Had all his professed sympathy and sorrow for Jane when she learned she was undergoing premature menopause been mere lip service to cover his secret delight at knowing he and she would never have to use any form of contraception ever again? She could hardly help thinking it had.

Over her fury at her husband’s surmised betrayal, Jane wore a composed and tranquil demeanor. Even as she raged within, she reminded herself that if keeping her from having babies by making her menopause arrive prematurely had motivated him to any degree in the crafting and release of his precocity virus, that part of his scheme she had already thwarted. Something—some intuition or premonition—told her even now to wait and see what his plans were now that he had achieved nearly everything he wanted; why was he still working at the lab, and what kind of work was he doing now that he’d achieved so many of his life’s objectives there?

Regularly scanning his computer for new files and new modifications to older files gave Jane the answer eventually: the reason Geoffrey hadn’t deleted and shredded the file containing so much proof of his endangering all humanity for his own selfish purposes was because he was crafting a new pathogen he called the Male Reproductive Precocity Virus, a genetic modifier that would do to the reproductive systems of boys and men much as his previous creation had done to girls and women, aging them rapidly to produce precocious spermarche in little boys and... well, she knew of no male equivalent to menopause; but chances were, rapidly aging a male’s sperm production system would do _something_ to degrade his sperm’s quality and quantity to the point of rendering it useless eventually. She thought of sabotaging his new project, letting it almost come to fruition and then having his personal computer suffer a _tragic_ “accidental” crash that would leave his files unrecoverable and force him to start the whole thing over again nearly from scratch, but decided this was nowhere near enough revenge for how he’d wronged her personally and the world’s girls and women in general. Instead, she copied numerous files from the database at the lab to her husband’s computer, and then moved them from there to her own computer for use in secretly crafting a few viruses of her own.

By the time Geoffrey had completed his second masterpiece, Jane’s unborn little girl was nearly four months along, and Jane had decided to reveal her secret (which was getting difficult to conceal by now anyway) just as soon as he released his new virus to see how he would react. When her searches of his home computer’s hard drive could no longer find the FRPV.gsq and MRPV.gsq files anywhere on it because he’d either archived them somewhere she couldn’t reach them or deleted them (probably the former, knowing his propensity for keeping old trophies and mementos), she was certain the time was right. As she’d half-expected would happen and half-dared to hope would not, he took the news very badly.

“But Geoffrey,” she pleaded, “you always knew I wanted to have children someday. You yourself paid for my eggs to be frozen, and went on paying to keep them in storage.”

“Yes, and you always knew I _didn’t_ want children!” he retorted. “I figured you’d take the hint eventually, and then somebody else would get to use those eggs, but you just had to get your way, didn’t you? Collecting and freezing the sperm from my used condoms was an especially low blow!”

“Why are you so afraid of having children, Geoffrey? You have a good job that pays well, I’m ready to do the mothering and discipline, the world is running out of children, and yet still you insist you want none. Are you afraid you’ll be tempted to rape my little girl when she turns four? Because that’s what gets you hot when you’re online and you think nobody’s watching?”

He got a stricken look on his face, and she knew that her last shot had hit home. “That’s just fantasy,” he muttered. “I could never do such a thing with a real child.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “For all your kinks, you never were that big on incest between daddies and their daughters, I notice; but somebody has to do it with her if she’s ever to have a baby of her own without spending the big bucks the way I have, isn’t that right? Wasn’t that the whole point of the Female Reproductive Precocity Virus?”

Now he seemed to be panicking outright. “How did you— What are you talking about?”

“That’s what got the late, great Doctor Phillip O’Donnell so angry at you that he tried to kill you, isn’t it? You know, you’re fortunate you have me to look out for you, Geoffrey. That virus he had targeted at you, I can’t even remember what it’s called now; its name was that hard to pronounce. I do remember some of the nasty things it does to you while killing you, though, according to some things I read about it when I looked it up online. I bet he regretted picking that out to target at you if he ever realized it had been re-targeted at him in those last few hours of his life.”

“ _You_ killed O’Donnell?” Geoffrey was still horrified, but suddenly he didn’t look quite as stricken. “I knew it! I knew it wasn’t an accident, just like I knew he’d never do a thing like that to himself! Yet I never even thought to suspect...!” He looked her straight in the eye. “How long have you been spying on us, you little vixen!? How did you find out how to get access to the genetic sequencer?”

“You forget, Doctor Geoffrey Klahn: I may never have been your top biology student back in the day, but I always did know my computers,” Jane declared. “Whoever does the coding for your lab could really use a lesson in computer and network security; but then again, so could you. I am impressed, you know: I only learned how to hack computer code, while you’ve hacked the biological codes for human nature itself. Like you when working with computers, I’m just a user when it comes to female biology—and male, for that matter; though I did enjoy using yours, I must say.” Pointedly looking down at the part of his biological anatomy she’d been using, she smirked.

Though thoroughly humiliated, he felt a spark of anger rising. “Oh, you’re one to talk! You chose to conceive a girl, even though you knew from the start what my precocity virus was going to do to her?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Would you rather I’d conceived a boy? But then, you’ve got a brand new precocity virus out there right now doing the same thing for boys and men as you’ve done for us girls and women, don’t you?”

“So you know about the Male Reproductive Precocity Virus too, I take it? I suppose I should have expected as much. How could you do this to me, Jane? How could you find out the exact reason why I didn’t want any children, and then go have one anyway?”

“Oh, so you really don’t like being a pedophile? You aren’t thrilled at the thought that in just a few years, somebody’s cute little boy in her kindergarten class will be pumping our darling little girl full of his sperm so she won’t have to spend the big bucks conceiving our grandchild as I did conceiving her? You might even get to watch, you know; isn’t that just what you’ve always wanted?”

“No!”

“That’s not what your internet history tells me.”

“It was never just about my sexuality, can’t you see? I truly do love little girls—and little boys too, though they could never be as beautiful in the eye of this beholder.”

“Oh, how poetic!” Jane scoffed.

“Listen to me: almost everywhere I looked, the world was treating those little girls—and the little boys too—like garbage. People were treating having children as an inconvenience—at best. The very people who claimed to be children’s biggest advocates were all rabidly advocating to have abortion—the _slaughter_ of those children before they’re even born—declared a universal human right! None of them seemed to appreciate what a precious, precious gift little children are, and what a tragedy losing even one of them is.”

“And you, oh noble pedophile that you are, did.”

He ignored her sarcasm. “Of course I did! I wanted everyone to start appreciating their children for the treasures they are. So, when my boss and colleague O’Donnell came up with an idea for using our lab to re-engineer all humanity’s genetics to make reproduction more difficult for the sake of population control, I decided to put my own unique spin on the project. He just wanted me to make women incapable of conceiving any babies after the first two without having a miscarriage, but I wanted a solution that wouldn’t allow them to conceive so many babies in the first place.”

Jane shook her head. “And this was your solution.”

“Exactly! Now see what I have wrought: all around the world, every child is indeed very much a wanted child, just as those mass murderers always claimed they wanted!”

“Except yours.”

Geoffrey glared at her. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Jane. When our little girl is born, we can put her up for adoption. I can assure you, desperate couples from all around the world will be beating down our door to adopt her. Even if they knew about her father’s deviant sexuality, they would be; hell, _especially_ if they knew!”

“But what about what I want, Geoffrey? This little girl is mine! She’s my little treasure! You were wrong about something, you know: I still can’t understand what any of this has to do with why you don’t want her to be your own. All those desperate couples looking to adopt would treasure her just as much as you say; so why not you? How can you not treasure your own flesh and blood, you flaming hypocrite!?”

“Jane, you said it yourself: you think I like being a pedophile? You think I’d enjoy having a cute little girl with a combination of your pretty face and my own crawling up into my lap for me to read her a story, maybe kissing me goodnight when I tuck her in, telling me she loves me, blissfully unaware how badly I want to rip off all her clothes and ram my penis up into her little vagina? Bad enough that I’d want to do that to anybody’s little four-year-old daughter, but my own flesh and blood at that; and to make matters worse, thanks to my precocity virus, she really could get pregnant by me! Is that what you want for us, Jane?”

“Then maybe I should have had a boy?”

“Now there’s an idea: a boy with half my genes! I honestly don’t know what makes me a pedophile: there’s no such thing as the ‘gay gene’ no matter what those pole-smokers and muff-divers and butt bandits have been pretending to us all these years, so I don’t think there’s any ‘pedo gene’ either; but my genes might just predispose him to develop the same deviant sexuality as his old man, especially if he’s legally allowed to have all the reproductive sex with his cute little classmates I’d like to have. Can you imagine my torment, my envy and jealousy, if he were to bring any of his little playmates home for this? I haven’t been in an elementary school since the day I graduated sixth grade, but that sure would change if my little boy were going to one, wouldn’t it?”

“Then tell me the truth, Geoffrey: do you want me to get an abortion?”

“ _Hell_ no! Didn’t you hear a word I just said!? I don’t want your little girl slain for the sins of her father; I just want you to give her up for adoption and let her be some other dad’s problem; some dad who won’t be tempted to impregnate her himself at the earliest opportunity.”

“Then how about a divorce? I’m not giving up my little girl, Geoffrey, not even if I have to give you up instead.”

“Why, you cruel, conniving little—” Geoffrey called Jane something pertaining to her reproductive parts he’d never called her out of anger before, though he’d “playfully” called her that a few times back when she’d been his student and asked him to “talk dirty” to her to spice up some of their early trysts; which she’d ceased to request after a while because it wasn’t exciting him or enhancing their lovemaking at all the way she’d hoped it would.

Tears began to stream from Jane’s eyes. “So that’s how it has to be, then?” she said. “Let it be written, and let it be done, then. I’ll pack my things, Geoffrey. You can go be the pedophile who turned all the little girls of the world into baby factories all on your own, and I promise you no one will ever need to know.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” he growled, seizing her by the wrist. “You’ve never made a promise you wouldn’t break, have you? I was thinking to make a counteractive virus someday, you know; maybe someday when people finally learned their lesson from this reproductive crisis I’ve engineered, but now that’s never going to happen. The world’s just going to have to learn to live with having its children making nearly all its babies from now on, as are you!” He raised his fist as if he were about to strike her.

Suddenly, Jane was surprisingly tranquil. “But Geoffrey...” she said in her most sardonic tone with a voice husky with her sobbing “...you wouldn’t hit a woman with a baby, would you?”

He lowered his fist. “Damn you!” he cursed, and then again: “DAMN YOU!!!” Releasing her wrist, he pulled his key ring from his pocket and fled to his car in the garage. Jane heard the garage door rise and his car peel out the driveway and into the street. He didn’t even halt for the moment it took to push the button on his remote to close the garage door behind him on his way out; and she didn’t bother to go out to the garage for all of the five seconds it would take to push the button to close that door either: she had something more immediately important to do.

Hurrying up the stairs to her computer, Jane moved all of the genetic sequencer files she had prepared for this moment over to her husband’s computer, and then rushed over there to load them into the genetic sequencer at his workplace. As she engaged the exploit she had discovered earlier to ensure the sequencer would dispense every one of the viruses she was creating into the room while “purging” its synthesis chamber of them, she couldn’t help smiling wryly at the irony of the situation: the files containing the complete genetic map of all personnel who worked at her husband’s lab had been a safety measure, a kind of backup against which they could compare a more current sampling of their DNA if any of it were to be altered so they’d know what parts of it needed to be corrected to what it had originally been. Though not as computer savvy as she was, Geoffrey had at least known to hack each of these files and update them with the changes each of his precocity viruses were going to make to everyone’s DNA to cover his tracks; and he had even taken care to fake the timestamps on these files’ creation and modification so anyone investigating them would believe them still to be the unaltered originals, though she knew better because she’d had the foresight to make records of what the exact times and dates had been so she would spot the discrepancies when he released his second precocity virus.

All the viruses she was releasing into the lab now were quiet assassins; nothing so cruel and sadistic as the late O’Donnell’s vicious creation had been. Her husband—and eventually all the other scientists employed at that lab—would simply die in their sleep—or in a stupor anyway—from a heart attack the first time they took a long rest from their day’s activities; that would be their final rest. Cold, hard, conniving, and calculating as she had to be to make herself click the button on the mouse—repeatedly—that would doom them all, she couldn’t help feeling some genuine grief over their imminent demise: like O’Donnell, some of them had been over to their house for dinner, and she was truly going to miss them.

“No man should have this power ever again, honey,” she said to the tiny unborn girl in her womb, and she could swear she felt a little kick as if in response to her words. “Someday, not too many years from now, you’ll understand that.” As soon as the very last file was loaded and the pathogen produced (one of those “null” viruses to displace the final viral assassin so it would take longer for anyone investigating the victims’ deaths to trace the killer viruses back to their source), she proceeded to download a program to “nuke” the hard drive by overwriting all the data on it with random noise. Just to make doubly sure all records of what she and her husband had done with the computer were destroyed, she then removed the hard drive and physically “nuked” it in her microwave for a few minutes before putting it back in the computer and closing up its case again.

At the lab, the sequencer finished producing the “null” virus mere seconds before Doctor Geoffrey Klahn—in a state of furious despair—arrived on the elevator with a tire iron from his car in hand and began smashing everything in sight, starting with his own computer and moving on to all the others and finishing with the genetic sequencer. Infused with a sampling of every one of the individually targeted assassin viruses his wife had created, he staggered forth from the compound a few minutes later, got into his car, and drove off randomly toward what destination he neither knew nor cared. His random journey ultimately put him on a freeway out of the state, from which he soon pulled over at a rest stop when he started having trouble keeping his eyes open; there, he closed them to rest for a while, and never opened them again; it would be several days before someone realized the reason why he hadn’t moved from that spot for several days was that he was dead.

At his house, meanwhile, the soon to be widowed Mrs. Jane Tucker Anthony Klahn spent just a few minutes purging her own computer of every file she’d acquired from her husband’s lab and ensuring it was thoroughly overwritten so that even the most sophisticated file retrieval equipment and software would never be able to recover it. When she was confident her work was done, she shut down the computer and went to bed; it was late, and knowing full well how long and complicated the inquiry into her late husband’s activities she’d soon be facing was sure to be, she needed as much sleep as she could get. As she lay there in the dark, already missing and mourning him despite how brutally he’d acted and spoken to her at their parting, she felt her tiny unborn baby within her kicking again.

“It’s all right, honey,” she said, smiling through her tears. “Everything’s going to be all right now. You’ll see.” Sliding a hand down into her panties, she gave herself a comforting—and somewhat stimulating—little massage. “For all his faults, your father was a great man, and soon—not too many years from now—you’ll come to appreciate what he’s done for you.” Her baby prodded one side of her womb with another kick. “The physical act of love is a beautiful thing, and when the time comes for some lucky little boy to put a baby in you, you’ll be ready for him.” As she imagined that moment just a few years from now, a “nap time” in kindergarten or maybe even preschool when her little daughter would be bedding down with a little boy she would pick out for her, her strokes got swifter and moisture began to weep from the opening through which her daughter would be emerging into the world some five months from now. “And thanks to your father, baby, he’ll be ready for you.” She climaxed, and then lay still, her heart throbbing; when the baby kicked again, each kick seemed to be in time with her heartbeat, seemingly as if she shared in her mother’s pleasure.

All around the world that night and every night to follow, the new precocity virus for males continued to spread unabated and unannounced, silently instigating an era of reproductive revolution consisting of whole generations of children being born to children; and within five years, giving birth to the next generation of children themselves with encouragement from their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. It was an end to the era of disdain for fecundity and the dawn of an era in which little boys and little girls would be experiencing incredible pleasures children so little had never been capable of experiencing before now. It was everything Doctor Geoffrey Klahn had ever wanted it to be, and tragically, he would never live to see it.

The End


End file.
